From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)
Date: Tue, 03 Apr 2012 20:06:50 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [TUHS]  man.cat-v.org
Message-ID: <1333498030.27060.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org>

   I ran across this web site, which conveniently hosts man pages for a number
  of bell labs operating systems. Does anyone have the man pages for 9th or
  10th edition that you could please share?

That's problematic.  Neither the limited-release V8 tape,
the even-more-limited V9 (I'm not sure there even was a
single such release, maybe we just sent out a few snapshots),
nor the never-really-sent-to-anyone 10th Edition system
has ever, so far as I know, escaped its original restrictive
licensing.  That includes the manual pages as well as the
software proper.

10/e is even tricker, because it was published as a book;
the ordinary book copyright on the contents may apply.

And since all that stuff is 20 years or more, and several
corporate reorgs/splits/buyouts, in the past, it may be
very hard to find anyone who will agree that the stuff is
no longer of any commercial value (the software all long
since outdated, the printed book long out of print).

Warren and Dennis and I talked about this many years ago.
As I recall, we concluded that if we could get at least
one of AT&T, Lucent, or the then-believed-owner of the
UNIX commercial intellectual property to say it was OK,
the others would likely go along; Warren had at the time
a good contact with the latter entity; but said entity
was still settling down after a buyout, so it seemed
wisest to wait a few months before pushing for anything
more.

Alas, said entity was Caldera, which had just bought up
The Santa Cruz Operation.  Before a few months had passed,
they had rebranded themselves as The SCO Group and shifted
their primary business from technology development to
pursuing untenable legal claims.

I've no idea where one would start these days even to
find the Gordian knot, let alone to cut it.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
(who wrote some of them there manual pages, and
some of the software they describe too, all a long
time ago in a hill atop a swamp far far away)

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