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.