[Info-vax] VLF: The 35th Anniversary Communique from the VMS Liberation Front

[Paul Sture]

In article <MPG.2af5ecc3d15b72b9989687 at news.zx.net.nz>,
 David Goodwin <dgsoftnz at gmail.com> wrote:

> In article <508a038c$0$38722$c3e8da3$aae71a0a at news.astraweb.com>, 
> jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca says...
> > 
> > On 12-10-25 21:19, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> > 
> > > It may well be that they don't own all of the IP hidden in VMS.
> > 
> > You mean to say that Hoff didn't write VMS all by himself and copied his
> > homework from other students in class ? :-) :-)
> > 
> > If there are portions bound by copyright, then HP would have contracts
> > that grant them limited use of certain technologies to be embedded in
> > VMS. It shouldn't be hard to find the drawer that contains those
> > contracts.

In practice it might be quite hard to find "the drawer that contains 
those contracts".  When HP took over Compaq they had to ring customers 
to find out which of their staff were working where.

> > And most companies that did that no longer exist anyways (for
> > instance, the DHCP server and GUI management tools came from Join which
> > no longer exist)

Quite likely bought from receivers by patent sharks.

> > X/Motif is interesting because it is proprietary when embeded in a
> > commercial system, but opensourced when embedded in an opensource
> > system. This is why it is available on the hobbyist systems, but for
> > commercial sales, HP has to hand over royalty money to X consortium or
> > whoever.
> 
> Actually, as of a few days ago Motif was released under the LGPL making 
> it open source everywhere:
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/motif/
> 
> CDE was also released under the LGPL back in August (with a possibility 
> of going MIT licensed in the future) and people have been busy cleaning 
> it up and porting it to modern 64bit Linux and *BSD systems:
> http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/

How does that work in practice?  Would VMS Engineering need to abandon 
existing sources and grab the LGPL ones instead?  The latter could turn 
into something of a porting exercise.

-- 
Paul Sture