[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

[Clem Cole]

Some more details below ...  But I've pointed out elsewhere to be careful
-- because the press did not always get it right.  Plus, looking at some of
the effects 50 years later without looking at the context and politics of
the time is very dangerous (think about the old SNL skit where
archeologists in hundreds of years later, open a sealed 1970s palm springs
home and find Izod Shirts, an answering machine and old tuna sandwich and
try to explain life 100 years before with just those items).

On Sat, Mar 11, 2023 at 6:12 AM Jonathan Gray <jsg at jsg.id.au> wrote:

>
> That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
>
> That was the second license that I am aware Wollongong had. Remember
that ISC and Wollongong received special V6 licenses (and maybe HCR - we'd
have to check with Mike Tikson) - more in a minute.

>
> ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
> "By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
> Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
>
Yup, Peter got a special license shortly after Wollongong - Heinz as a
founder/early person at ISC may know more of the details.

> ...
> The company calls its enhanced Unix systems Interactive System/One.
> Interactive System/Two is coming along. It too is based on a Bell Labs
> development.  This one, called Programmers Workbench (PWB), uses Unix
> and makes it possible to develop software for large scale computers
> using minis. Interactive has a license from Bell for PWB, similar to
> the one it holds for Unix."
>
Again check with Heinz here - I do not believe that was actually able to be
executed as the V7 redistribution license came into being. I'm not sure
that I believe Datamation as gospel. I know they miss quoted/represented me
and some of my friends a few times in those days.

It's possible that Peter Weiner and the ISC team may have had something
special (like PWB1) - but Al Arms was getting really skittish at the time
and trying to stop having one-off licenses. The AT&T legal team needed to
demonstrate they were being 'fair and reasonable' [more in a minute].

So the background is this ...

1956 consent decree says AT&T and, in particular, their commercial sales
arm, Western Electric, can not be in the commercial electronics (or later
computer biz).    In fact, this is why they drop out of the selling tubes
to folks - so you see WE components in AT&T equipment but not in other
places - and TI/RCA/GE, *etc* all become the primary transistor
producers).   I'm not sure how Teletype was an end-around - although they
were originally selling equipment for the telegraph network.  Since
Teletype and Friden were already the big two players, and most people
bought from them before 1947 for those styles of devices - there must have
been some sort of ruling that the AT&T attorneys got in the late 1950s to
allow that to continue as being part of the telephone/telegraph business
and the computer folks were using their devices - not the other way round.

By the early/mid-1970s, AT&T was being investigated for monopoly by the US
Justice Dept for the second time since 1947.  This suit is very much the
"Sword of Damocles" and all actions in the commercial world in the 1970s
must recognize this suit is steering many of the choices/decisions by sr.
AT&T managers.  By the 1956 decree,  AT&T is >>required<< to make licenses
 available from their IP to the research community and provide 'reasonable
and fair terms' to people that want to use it commercially (again, think
the transistor).  So there is a patent and license team in MH set up to
work on these "few" requests.  If you look in the histories, Al Arms said
they handled a few requests per year, maybe one a month.

UNIX appeared in the late 1960s/1970s, and the team started to publish
papers about it which got folks like me interested.  So ... the first UNIX
licenses are for universities - (Lou Katz at Columbia is "user 0"). And Al
starts to get "inundated with requests" for the research world.    The
first licenses were one-offs, but by the time V6 - they had a university
license template for use. But in either case, the license says - "sure, go
ahead and play with it, but don't ask us for help"  (as we said at the time
- AT&T/WE was "abandoned UNIX on your doorstep"). The UNIX IP ends up at
Harvard and then some Harvard folks end up at Rand.       Rand  [a
commercial entity] wants to use the IP - so the original license for
researchers is insufficient.

The legal team AT&T in MH has a problem ... content decree says they can
license it but can not "sell.".  They write a special license for Rand (for
the Fifth Edition, I think - but it may have 6th by then, and I never asked
any of the Rand folks how much $s was exchanged).    Shortly after that, a
few other commercial folks appear (ISC, Wollogone being two), and the
original Rand commercial license is more formalized for the 6th edition
commercial license (*a.k.a.* in the order of $15K for the first CPU, 3K for
the second/3rd, *etc*. IIRC - but that might be wrong).    Remember, a
PDP-11 large enough to run UNIX costs about $150-200K so 10% was considered
"fair and reasonable").

I have never figured out who was first (Peter Weiner at ISC or the folks at
Wollongong) or the amount of the fees involved, but at some point, both
managed to negotiate a special license to redistribute UNIX in some manner.
My memory is that the commercial target had to get some sort of license
from AT&T first. My memory of the ISC product was it was the source for
your 11/70 [factiod - the Motorola guys were using it for what would
eventually become the 68000 - Les Crudele told me they had source].  I also
remember that when later Wollongong Vax products appeared, sources were
available, but I've forgotten the details - I was never a customer --
Warner might know more here.

Time rolls forward and V7 gets released ...  By now, there is now a larger
group of commercial folks beginning to ask about redistribution (order
25-50).  Again Al Arms legal team does not want a special for each, so they
drew up the terms for the V7 commercial license.    Which was $20K first
CPU, $5K second or more, unless you had a binary redistribution license
which was $150K for the >>rights<<, and then there was a sliding scale for
the binaries that started at $1.5K.  There were a bunch of other terms in
that license that were problematic (which I've forgotten and no longer have
a draft), but as I said, almost the moment Al Arms and the team announced
the V7 commercial redistribution license - numerous firms were unhappy.

An important thing occurred ( check out
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1658611 ), which is the IEEE 1978
Asilomar Workshop on Microprocessors - Stanford Professor Dennis Allison
was the key organizer.  I remember lots of the commercial folks at what we
now call AMW, both thrilled and complaining about the fact that AT&T was
working on a redistribution license.  By the 1979 version of the AMW, the
hue, and cry were getting loud.  Remember that Prof. Allison was consulting
for most of us in those days, and by December, he organized a meeting of
about ten firms at Ricki's Hyatt and got Al Arms to come.

I don't remember the Wollongong folks being there [but they were likely
invited], but I do remember Peter Weiner was there (as was Bill Gates and
Bob Greenberg from Microsoft as well as Bob Metcalfe from his new
start-up 3Com). But there were folks from HP, Tektronix, DEC, IBM, and
smaller firms like ISC and SCO. Two things came out of that meeting -- one
was we started to negotiate what would become the System III license and
this also set the seeds for the creation of */usr/group* (later called
UNICOM) as USENIX/IEEE/ACM were not in a position (nor did any of them want
to be) to try to be a commercial UNIX trade group.

So ... AT&T (via Al Arms) *wanted one place to negotiate and in the open* -
so they could show the justice department that they were neither trying to
be in the business (i.e., we were all coming to them) and were always
treating everyone in the "market" the same -* i.e.* common license terms
(post-Judge the later did not work out too well and we ended up with OSF /
UI and the rest of the war).



ᐧ
ᐧ
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20230311/1ae0de96/attachment.htm>