[TUHS] Re: Early BSD license thread

[Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>]

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On Sep 21, 2022, at 8:25 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com <mailto:imp@bsdimp.com>> wrote:
> 
> That makes a lot of sense. When there was a name, it was preserved, but a huge amount of the sources had nothing at all in the source files to identify it. One big area of contribution was into the kernel where the options sometimes contained the name of where the code came from. In the 2BSD kernels we see eg TEXAS_AUTOBAUD, MENLO_OVLY, MENLO_KOV, MENLO_JCL, MPX_FILS, CGL_RTP and a bunch of UCB_ names. It's clear the non UCB ones came from elsewhere, but there's no info on where they came from (they are documented in setup.5 at least so I know what they are). So given the sparseness of the early marking for provenance, the coments make more sense and give a better timeframe to it.

Recall that the US joined the Berne Convention in 1988. As I recall prior to that you had to stick to some copyright formalities such as putting your copyright & year in the source code. As I recall the US law didn't protect your copyright if you didn't do this in sources. This may have played a part in UCB adding a copyright source files that didn't have anything? I could be wrong but these are just some random bits picked up at the time. I did get in the habit of putting at least a one line copyright notice by default starting in 1981 (either for whatever company I worked for at the time or my own copyright for code I wrote on my own at home).

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