VMS sources (was: Re: [HECnet] NCP-F-NETIO)

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

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