[TUHS] Were any of the commercial unixes source-available?

[Andy Wallis]

On 2023-09-03 08:40, Marc Donner wrote:
> My team at Morgan Stanley had a source license to SunOS in the early
> ‘90s.  We tried to secure a license to AIX source but never
> succeeded.

We had access to the AIX source at my work place. The AIX 3.2.5 source 
delivery included a build machine because we had requirements to be able 
to support and redistribute AIX 3.2.5 for up to 20 years. As I recall, 
it required a lot of high level negotiations between us and IBM to get 
that.

Access was limited to select people on an air-gapped machine. The source 
code itself was locked away on 8mm tape and required signatures to check 
it out.

IBM did have a public announcement letter for AIX 3.2.5 source access.
http://bio.gsi.de/DOCS/AIX/ENUSZP93-0158.printable.html

We also had access to the various AIX versions that we had to support 
our government customers. I know we had access to AIX 4.3.3, 5.1,5,2, 
and 5.3 source code. One of our developers would fix bugs that he found 
and file PMRs to tell the AIX developers what exactly to fix. A strip 
command change to support very large executables took 18 months for them 
to fix because they didn't understand why failing to strip very large 
binaries was a problem.
-Andy Wallis