[COFF] Re: [ih] Fwd: Some Berkeley Unix history - too many PHDs per packet

[Toerless Eckert <tte@cs.fau.de>]

Thanks Clem for those memories and details.

I only joined university in 1995, so my first collision with this whole copyright mess
was when we had to sign individually for our groups SunOS source code license according
to Sun's policies back then - but i don't think this was relating to AT. Of course, both
ATT and BSD source code licenses where necessary for SunOS liceses back then. The 
BSD requirement may have went away when Sun rebased to SVR4. Not sure.

I sometimes wonder what would have become of Linux if the whole CSRG/ATT lawsuit
would have settled before 1991. For us in University doing OS research, it was quite
annoying when we had all invested so much into SysV and BSD unix, but then our students
told us from 1991 on to just forget about it and founded or joined companies doing Linux
distributions (Suse being the local one from my universities metro area). Of course, in hindsight,
this may have been a good thing, but of course, it took a long time for Linux to catch up,
and i would not wonder if BSD die hards say that it still has not.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Sat, Mar 09, 2024 at 02:52:28PM -0500, Clem Cole via Internet-history wrote:
> This is UNIX history, but since the Internet's history and Unix history are
> so intertwined, I'm going to risk the wrath of the IH moderators to try to
> explain, as I was one of the folks who was at the table in those the times
> and participated in my small way in both events: the birth of the Internet
> and the spreading of the UNIX IP.
> 
> More details can be found in a paper I did a few years ago:
> https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-aux-etats-unis-innovation-diffusion-et-appropriation--945215.kjsp
> [If you cannot find it and are interested send me email off list and I'll
> forward it].
> 
> And ... if people want to continue this discussion -- please, please, move
> it to the more appropriate COFF mailing list:
> https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff - which I have CC'ed in
> this reply.
> 
> 
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 11:32 PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history <
> internet-history@elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> > Forwarded for Barbara
> >
> > > I will admit your response is confusing me.  My post only concerns what
> > I think I remember as a  problem in getting BSD UNIX, in particular the
> > source code. Nothing about getting something  we wanted to use on a
> > hardware platform from one of the commercial vendors.  We needed the BSD
> > source but got hung up.
> >
> 
> Let me see if I can explain better ...
> 
> Assuming you were running BSD UNIX on a Vax, your team would have needed
> two things:
> 
>    - an AT&T License for 32/V [Research Version 7 -- port to a Vax/780 at
>    AT&T] and a
>    - a license for BSD 3, later 4, then 4.1, *etc*., from the Regents of
>    the University of CA.
> 
> The first license gave your team core a few rights from AT&T:
> 
>    1.  the right to run UNIX binaries on a single CPU (which was named in
>    your license)
>    2. the right to look at and modify the sources,
>    3. the right the create derivative works from the AT&T IP, and
>    4. the right to exchange your derivative works with others people that
>    held a similar license from AT&T.
> 
> [AT&T had been forced to allow this access (license) to their IP under the
> rules of the 1956 consent decree - see paper for more details, but
> remember, as part of the consent decree allow it to have a legal monopoly
> on the phone system, AT&T had to make its IP available to the US Gov --
> which I'm guessing the crux of Barbara's question/observation].
> 
> For not-for-profits (University/Research), a small fee was allowed to be
> charged (order of 1-2 hundred $s) to process the paperwork and copy the mag
> tape. But their IP came without any warranty, and you had to hold AT&T
> harmless if you used it. In those days, we referred to this as *the UNIX IP
> was abandoned on your doorstep.*   BTW: This license allowed the research
> sites to move AT&T derivative work (binaries) within their site freely.
> Still, if you look at the license carefully, most had a restriction
> (often/usually ignored at the universities) that the sources were supposed
> to only be available on the original CPU named in their specific license.
> 
> Thus, if you were a University license, no fees were charged to run the
> AT&T IP on other CPUs --> however, the licensees were not allowed to use it
> for "commercial" users at the University [BTW: this clause was often
> ignored, although a group of us at CMU hackers in the late 1970s famously
> went on strike until the Unversity obtained at least one commercial
> license].  The agreement was that a single CPU should be officially bound
> for all commercial use for that institution.  I am aware that Case-Western
> got a similar license soon after CMU did (their folks found out about
> the CMU strike/license).  But I do not know if MIT, Standford, or UCB
> officials came clean on that part and paid for a commercial license
> (depending on the type of license, its cost was the order of $20K-25K for
> the first CPU and an order of $7K-10K for each CPU afterward - each of
> these "additional cpu' could also have the sources - but named in an
> appendix for each license with AT&T).   I believe that some of the larger
> state schools like Penn State, Rutgers, Purdue, and UW started to follow
> that practice by the time Unix started to spread around each campus.
> 
> That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the
> Regents of the University of CA and managed by its  'Industrial
> Laison's Office" at UCB (the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought licenses
> for tools like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS,* et al*). This license gave the holder
> the right to examine and use the UCB's derivative works on anything as long
> as you acknowledged that you got that from UCB and held the
> Regents blameless [we often called this the 'dead-fish license' -- *you
> could make a chip, make a computer, or even wrap dead-fish in it.*  But you
> had to say you started with something from the Regents, but they were not
> to be blamed for what you did with it].
> 
> The Regents were exercising rights 3 and 4 from AT&T. Thus, a team who
> wanted to obtain the Berkeley Software Distribution for UNIX (*a.k.a*. BSD)
> needed to demonstrate that they held the appropriate license from AT&T
> [send a copy of the signature page from your license to the ILO] before UCB
> would release the bits. They also had a small processing fee to the IOL in
> the order of $1K.   [The original BSD is unnumbered, although most refer to
> it today as 1BSD to differentiate it from later BSD releases for UNIX].
> 
> Before I go on, in those times, the standard way we operated was that you
> needed to have a copy of someone else's signature page to share things. In
> what would later become USENIX (truth here - I'm an ex-president of the
> same), you could only get invited and come to a conference if you were
> licensed from AT&T. That was not a big deal. We all knew each other.
> FWIW: at different times in my career, I have had a hanging file in a
> cabinet with a copy of the number of these pages from different folks, with
> whom I would share mag tapes (remember this is pre-Internet, and many of
> the folks using UNIX were not part of the ARPAnet).
> 
> However, the song has other verses that make this a little confusing.
> 
> If your team obtained a* commercial use license* from AT&T, they could
> further obtain a *commercial redistribution license*.  This was initially
> granted for the Research Seventh Edition. It was later rewritten (with the
> business terms changing each time) for what would eventually be called
> System III[1], and then the different System V releases.   The price of the
> redistribution license for V7 was $150K, plus a sliding scale per CPU you
> ran the AT&T IP, depending on the number of CPUs you needed. With this, the
> single CPU for the source restriction was removed.
> 
> So ... if you had a redistribution license, you could also get a license
> from the Regents, and as long as you obeyed their rules, you could sell a
> copy of UNIX to run on any licensed target.  Traditionally, hardware is
> part of the same purchase when purchased from a firm like DEC, IBM,
> Masscomp,* etc*. However, separate SW licenses were sold via firms such as
> Microsoft and Mt. Xinu. The purchaser of *a binary license* from one of
> those firms did not have the right to do anything but use the AT&T
> derivative work.  If your team had a binary licensee, you could not obtain
> any of the BSD distributions until the so-called 'NET2" BSD release [and
> I'm going to ignore the whole AT&T/BSDi/Regents case here as it is not
> relevant to Barbara's question/comment].
> 
> So the question is, how did a DoD contractor, be it BBN, Ford Aerospace,
> SRI, etc., originally get access to UNIX IP? Universities and traditional
> research teams could get a research license.   Commercial firms like DEC
> needed a commercial licensee. Folks with DoD contracts were in a hazy
> area.    The original v5 commercial licensee was written for Rand, a DoD
> contractor.   However, as discussed here in the IH mailing list and
> elsewhere, some places like BBN had access to the core UNIX IP as part of
> their DoD contracts. I believe Ford Aerospace was working with AT&T
> together as part of another US Gov project - which is how UNIX got there
> originally (Ford Aero could use it for that project, but not the folks at
> Ford Motors, for instance].
> 
> The point is, if you access the *IP indirectly* such as that, then
> your site probably did not have a negotiated license with a signature page
> to send to someone.
> 
> @Barbara, I can not say for sure, but if this was either a PDP-11 or a VAX
> and you wanted one of the eBSDs, I guess/suspect that maybe your team was
> dealing with an indirect path to AT&T licensing -- your site license might
> have come from a US Gov contract, not directly. So trying to get a BSD tape
> directly from the IOL might have been more difficult without a signature
> page.
> 
> So, rolling back to the original.  You get access to BSD sources, but you
> had to demonstrate to the IOL folks in UCB's Cory Hall that you were
> legally allowed access to the AT&T IP in source code form.  That
> demonstration was traditionally fulfilled with a xerographic copy of the
> signature page for your institution, which the IOL kept on file.   That
> said, if you had legal access to the AT&T IP by indirect means, I do not
> know how the IOL completed that check or what they needed to protect the
> Regents.
> 
> Clem
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 1.] What would be called a System from a marketing standpoint was
> originally developed as PWB 3.0.   This was the system a number of firms,
> including my own, were discussing with AT&T at the famous meetings at
> 'Ricky's Hyatt' during the price (re)negotiations after the original V7
> redistribution license.
> -- 
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history@elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

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---
tte@cs.fau.de