Re: [TUHS] Prime Time Freeware <- Sun User Group tapes

[Rich Morin <rdm@cfcl.com>]

> On Feb 16, 2021, at 11:39, John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> wrote:
> 
> ... A copy of both the 1987 tape and the 1989 tape are here:
> 
>  http://www.toad.com/SunUserGroupTape-Rel-1987.1.0.tar.gz
>  http://www.toad.com/SunUserGroupTape-Rel-1989.tar
>  http://www.toad.com/

As always, John Gilmore rocks...  (John, can you tell folks about the
history, rationale, and text of the Sun-1's PROM identification message?)

> I'll have to do a bit more digging to turn up more than vague memories
> about our dealings with the lawyers...

I have two legal war stories to relate, offhand...

# AT&T

I tried to find a way to get permission to include copies of text files
(both vanilla and modified, IIRC) that were part of the "binary" release.
(I thought it might be useful for folks to have backup and/or "improved"
versions.)  I was flatly informed that all files in a binary distribution
were, by definition, binary (not text).  So, we had nothing to discuss.
I never did manage to break through that legal stonewall.

# Sun

The other story (fortunately!) ended more successfully.  You see, Sun's
legal staff had drafted a "minimal" agreement that folks _donating_ bits
were expected to sign off on.  IIRC, it ran on for about twenty pages (!).

John and I were both appalled and tried to tell the lawyer we met with that
the authors and organizations involved wouldn't sign off on anything like
this; indeed, they wouldn't even read it.

Since John was pretty incensed, I got to play Good Cop.  IIRC, I asked John
to list the issues that he thought reasonable for the agreement to cover.
With some grumbling, he came up with a set of issues whose legalese filled
one side of a (letter-size :-) page.

I then turned to the Sun lawyer (who was actually trying to be helpful and
make things work) and asked him to tell us about any _critical_ issues John
had left out.  However, I only gave him a one-page budget.

Adding the mutually acceptable issues brought the agreement up to two pages,
which I got John (with a bit more grumbling) to accept.  The lawyer then
had the (unenviable) task of getting Sun to sign off on it.  He did, and SUG
was able to get donation sign-offs and produce a useful tape (whew!).  I'm
sure it helped that the folks doing the first tape were working at LLNL...

-r