Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3318 mails)

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 09 January 2008 11:51, Bill Anderson wrote:
> Randall R Schulz wrote:
> > On Tuesday 08 January 2008 13:28, Bill Anderson wrote:
> > > .... I remember when Bill Joy, who was
> > > at BSD in those days, released vi as shareware.
> >
> > I don't think that could have happened, since Vi / Ex were derived
> > from and included code from ed and hence were covered by AT&T
> > copyright.
>
> I was working for Onyx Systems at the time vi /ex became available.
> We were porting Version 7 Unix to a Zilog Z8000 and the disk was a
> Corvus ShoeBox disk. I was told to download it from Berkeley via good
> ol' uucp. I did, I compiled, I have used it since.

Being able to acquire some source code does not imply it has 
been "released as share-ware."

The classic Vi source may now be under the BSD license, but that was 
most certainly not true during the era of v7 Unix ports to things like 
the Z8000 (since the concept of an open-source license did not exist 
then). On the other hand, if you were doing that port legally, which I 
gather you were, then you had a license from AT&T to use, modify and 
redistribute Unix (as LCC did), that would have given you the right to 
include Vi.

(I vaguely recall Onyx; I worked for Locus Computing in Santa Monica 
from '83 to about '87 on distributed Unix, the first transparent file 
sharing between DOS and Unix and the first SMB server for Unix, which 
my team did for AT&T.)


> ...


> Bill Anderson
> WW7BA


Randall Schulz
-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx