On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 4:33 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
it only means that the IP owners didn't find it worth the trouble to enforce the software license.
Fair enough. But it was standard practice. I have not idea if Xerox paid DEC for the licenses for the compiler and other tools suite for their PDP-10 clone at PARC. It possible they just shied away from anything with such a copyright notice, and could because like UNIX today, all of the research community was using PDP-10s (which is why they wanted one at PARC) and there were "open source" and "free" compilers that the DARPA had paid for coming out Stanford, CMU, MIT and the like. I never used that machine, but I certainly new of it.
By the mid late 1970s, I did use an Alto, and the SW we were running on it by that time was Xerox created. But one of it's designers is an old friend (and officemate) and he used to say their had been a lot of Nova code running on the Altos. How much did the use from DG, again I do not know.
I do know the Amdahl's ran IBM code. IBM had just been sued about "bundling" SW so, it possible they ignored it a bit because they were being chased from the Justice Dept WRT monopoly and just decided it was not worth trying to enforce it.
On 8 Jan 2013, at 16:33, <Paul_Koning at Dell.com> wrote:
On Jan 8, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:20 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
What DEC and others did is to provide listings you could read, but you weren't allowed to use or modify the code. Sources, maybe, but even then I don't think you could hand the resulting executable bits to anyone outside your organization.
I think you are split hairs a little.
...
Simple put, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, different firms make sold "clones" of different machines that used the original developers code base. The "cloners" made the market bigger and sometimes (like Foonly) could serve a need the primary manufacturer was not going to supply.
True. And they often got away with that. That doesn't mean the licenses permitted it -- it only means that the IP owners didn't find it worth the trouble to enforce the software license. A possible reason is that there wasn't much case history for software IP, while there was already a lot of case history for device patents, so attacking a cloner via patent rights was easier and more reliable.
But even as far back as 1974 you'd find source code with headers saying things like this:
; THE SOFTWARE DESCRIBED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS FURNISHED TO THE PURCHASER
; UNDER A LICENSE FOR USE ON A SINGLE COMPUTER SYSTEM AND CAN BE COPIED
; (WITH INCLUSION OF DIGITAL'S COPYRIGHT NOTICE) ONLY FOR USE IN SUCH
; SYSTEM, EXCEPT AS MAY OTHERWISE BE PROVIDED IN WRITING BY DIGITAL.
which pretty clearly tells cloners to go away. Again, that doesn't mean it was uniformly enforced, but it does mean that was the stated restriction. Certainly this is nothing like open source.
Unix of course is a very different beast.
You mean beasts. ;)
You have just so many to choose from Each with a different license, each with different terms...
paul
On Jan 8, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:20 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
What DEC and others did is to provide listings you could read, but you weren't allowed to use or modify the code. Sources, maybe, but even then I don't think you could hand the resulting executable bits to anyone outside your organization.
I think you are split hairs a little.
...
Simple put, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, different firms make sold "clones" of different machines that used the original developers code base. The "cloners" made the market bigger and sometimes (like Foonly) could serve a need the primary manufacturer was not going to supply.
True. And they often got away with that. That doesn't mean the licenses permitted it -- it only means that the IP owners didn't find it worth the trouble to enforce the software license. A possible reason is that there wasn't much case history for software IP, while there was already a lot of case history for device patents, so attacking a cloner via patent rights was easier and more reliable.
But even as far back as 1974 you'd find source code with headers saying things like this:
; THE SOFTWARE DESCRIBED IN THIS DOCUMENT IS FURNISHED TO THE PURCHASER
; UNDER A LICENSE FOR USE ON A SINGLE COMPUTER SYSTEM AND CAN BE COPIED
; (WITH INCLUSION OF DIGITAL'S COPYRIGHT NOTICE) ONLY FOR USE IN SUCH
; SYSTEM, EXCEPT AS MAY OTHERWISE BE PROVIDED IN WRITING BY DIGITAL.
which pretty clearly tells cloners to go away. Again, that doesn't mean it was uniformly enforced, but it does mean that was the stated restriction. Certainly this is nothing like open source.
Unix of course is a very different beast.
paul
Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> writes:
--e89a8f64310498553304d2cd77d8 Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=ISO-8859-1
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- <
system at tmesis.com> wrote:
The "listing" portion is far more valuable than the source > itself. >
Amen - although I might say - "was often more valuable" -- if you had
a bug needed to fix it fast, the key you could (which is the cry of the
FOSS movement). You did not have to wait for the vendor.
But more often than note, the reason you wanted to see the source was to
understand a behavior what was happening that did not make sense.
Sometimes, you might find a bug, but more often than not, I might find a
way to do what i wanted to do with what I had in hand,
I recently (well OK, 9 months ago) discovered a day-one bug in the OpenVMS
Itanium primitives for self-relative queue manipulation. While I have the
source listings, I found it far easier to explore what was happening using
the "poor-man's microfiche" and ANALYZE/CRASH. I wrote an extensive blog
on it. It was one of the last bugs that Clair Grant worked before he was
made an OpenVMS Engineering outcast. :( Point is that with the right tool,
you can figure out what's going on. In the days of the listings on fiche,
I found it often much easier to look at the code in SDA than to lug about
the fiche reader and ruin my eyesight.
--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG
Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- <system at tmesis.com> wrote:
The "listing" portion is far more valuable than the source
itself.
Amen - although I might say - "was often more valuable" -- if you had a bug needed to fix it fast, the key you could (which is the cry of the FOSS movement). You did not have to wait for the vendor.
But more often than note, the reason you wanted to see the source was to understand a behavior what was happening that did not make sense. Sometimes, you might find a bug, but more often than not, I might find a way to do what i wanted to do with what I had in hand,
On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 3:20 PM, <Paul_Koning at dell.com> wrote:
What DEC and others did is to provide listings you could read, but you weren't allowed to use or modify the code. Sources, maybe, but even then I don't think you could hand the resulting executable bits to anyone outside your organization.
I think you are split hairs a little. We should talk this off line if you want to discuss it much more.
I'm not a lawyer and do not pretend to be one. I did live a lot of this including the AT&T/UCB case and today I help teach a course at Intel on Copyright and IP protection that is required for all our SW developers - so comfortable in saying I think I understand most of the subtleties.
I will point out that the Amdahl machines ran OS/360, TSS, VM etc..
Foonly and Xerox's MACie ran Tenex and the stock DEC compile suite. The Xerox Alto's were a Nova clone and lot of the code that ran in them was just that (although Xerox would be know for the boat load of SW they would write for them),
And as Ken O'Mundro used to remind everyone at USENIX conferences, it was not the instruction set and SW that got him trouble with KO - the CalData machine when it Nova microcode in it, could run DG's SW. KO did not like that Ken made a UNIBUS replacement.
Simple put, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, different firms make sold "clones" of different machines that used the original developers code base. The "cloners" made the market bigger and sometimes (like Foonly) could serve a need the primary manufacturer was not going to supply.
You are mentioning the part of "copy right" and basically, anyone with a common license allowed you to shared code. This was what we in UNIX land did extensively. So folks like me used to keep a pile of "signature pages" for different people licenses in our filing cabinet before we sent them our modified versions tapes.
The rules about copyright and SW were really unclear in the 1960s and 70s, and it would actually not get decided with real case law until the early-mid 1980s with the Apple/Franklin Computer Case (Apple had copyvwritten it's ROMs and Franklin "cloned" them). But using SW IP if the copyright license did not tell you that you could not, was consider ok for a long time. In fact that was the basis of the Franklin argument - to be a compatible it needed to use Apple's ROMs.
The original IBM user group was called "SHARE" and they did just that, as did DECUS folks. We all traded patches because we had the sources. My first job at CMU was looking at IBM source patches and figuring out how to make them work or if they mattered any more to our custom TSS system. We also got patches from other users and we pushed our changes out. IIRC, there were more Amdahl machines running TSS than IBM HW - but TSS was an IB product and ran IBM "layered products."
FYI: >>Free<< and Open Source which is what Linux, FreeBSD et al are based on today. They keep point is Free in some manner - typically with a license that allows a more free use of the IP.
BTW: I've always said the real father of the OSS movement, was the late Prof Don Pederson of UCB. His many generations of students would "publish" code. He started that practice in the late 1960s and it would become the guts of UCB "Industrial Liaisons Office" - and even later CSRG etc. BSD - Berkeley Software Distribution. The predecessor to the UNIX BSD tape, was the EE "Tools Tape" (SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS et al).
As "dop" would say - "I always give away our source, that way I come in the back door. Other places [ such as CMU and MIT would license code sources and as he mentioned ] came in the front door like any other salesman."
Clem
John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> writes:
From: <Paul_Koning at Dell.com>
Can't search microfiche, and a fiche reader is a clumsy and hard to use
contraption.
I always figured that was the whole point. You had to do a *lot* of
squinting and typing before you could do anything that DEC didn't want
you to.
How do you figure. Fiche was the media of its day and listings were
for reference; not intended to you to rebuild VMS. When CD-rom first
appeared on the scene, DEC put the listings on CD-rom. You could run
utilities like UNLIS (I believe my good buddy Hunter wrote that) which
could give you sanitized source but I wouldn't try to use it do to the
Copyright. The "listing" portion is far more valuable than the source
itself.
--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG
Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.
From: <Paul_Koning at Dell.com>
Can't search microfiche, and a fiche reader is a clumsy and hard to use
contraption.
I always figured that was the whole point. You had to do a *lot* of squinting
and typing before you could do anything that DEC didn't want you to.
John Wilson
D Bit
::-)
------Origineel bericht------
Van: Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman-
Afzender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] Re: VMS sources
Verzonden: 8 januari 2013 21:43
<Paul_Koning at Dell.com> writes:
On Jan 8, 2013, at 3:04 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> writes:=20 >=20 >> On 01/08/2013
02:55 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote: >>> I've always wondered >> about VMS
sources: how they are actually distributed >>> today and how >> much
space they take? Is a CD-ROM enough for everything? And in >>> >> which
format are they? Just simple text files in a bunch of directories >> or
there is something fancier such as some cross references and >>
indexes? >> >> They used to make source *listings* available on fiche;
I have several >> sets of those. It's a stack of fiche maybe 3-4" >>
thick. > > How old are these "listings"?=20 >>=20 >> I haven't looked at
them in years, but I think I have at least 5.1 and >> 5.2, possibly
4.7.=20 >=20 > But who needs the source listings when you've got access
to the poor-man'= s > microfiche?
Can't search microfiche, and a fiche reader is a clumsy and hard to use
con= traption.
The "poor-man's microfiche" refers to:
$ ANALYZE/SYSTEM
SDA> EXAMINE/INSTRUCTION address;range
--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG
Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.
<Paul_Koning at Dell.com> writes:
On Jan 8, 2013, at 3:04 PM, Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- wrote:
Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> writes:=20 >=20 >> On 01/08/2013
02:55 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote: >>> I've always wondered >> about VMS
sources: how they are actually distributed >>> today and how >> much
space they take? Is a CD-ROM enough for everything? And in >>> >> which
format are they? Just simple text files in a bunch of directories >> or
there is something fancier such as some cross references and >>
indexes? >> >> They used to make source *listings* available on fiche;
I have several >> sets of those. It's a stack of fiche maybe 3-4" >>
thick. > > How old are these "listings"?=20 >>=20 >> I haven't looked at
them in years, but I think I have at least 5.1 and >> 5.2, possibly
4.7.=20 >=20 > But who needs the source listings when you've got access
to the poor-man'= s > microfiche?
Can't search microfiche, and a fiche reader is a clumsy and hard to use
con= traption.
The "poor-man's microfiche" refers to:
$ ANALYZE/SYSTEM
SDA> EXAMINE/INSTRUCTION address;range
--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG
Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.
