[Info-vax] [Attn: HP Employees] PDP-11 OS hobbyist licensing

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Bill Gunshannon <bill at server3.cs.scranton.edu> wrote:

(snip on SIMH and licensing)

> If people are really interested I still have copies of the License as it
> was distrbuted with various packages of OS software.  The files are all
> July 31, 1997 so I assume that was the date contained in the tar file
> that contained the software and the license.
 
(snip)
>> The licence says _owned_ by DEC. It doesn't say anything about been _sold_
>> by DEC. :-) It was a personal project by it's original author while a DEC
>> employee.
 
> I was involved with the PDP-11 from around 1980 and I don't remember DEC
> ever offering an emulator, commercially or otherwise.  I know Bob Supnik
> worked for DEC, but I always thought the emulator was his pet project.
> Which probably explains why he was allowed tot ake it with him when he
> left and it has no earlier copyrights than his.

Working on personal project related to your company work is always
complicated. My understanding (again, IANAL) is that unless he was
very careful about it that it would belong to DEC. 

In cases where you can make a clear separation, maybe a simulator
for the physics of black holes, (just a random example) that 
obviously DEC isn't doing, then it might not be so hard.

To keep a simulator for a DEC processor separate, he might have
needed to document the exact times he worked on it, and show that
those times were personal times. Also, it might have helped to 
do it on hardware not owned by DEC.

There is a story about a socket wrench designed by a Sears
employee that Sears then went on to patent and sell. 
If the employee had been in the wrench design group that might
have been fine, but he was, as well as I remember, just a Sears
sales person. He then sued and got the rights back. 
(Maybe the biggest improvement in wrench technology since
the invention of the socket wrench.)

-- glen