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

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <524b23a5$0$7151$c3e8da3$76a7c58f at news.astraweb.com>,
	JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> While simh may or may not have ties to DEC, it is simply a hardware
> emulator and has nothing to do with any operating system running on it.
> 
> So licensing issues for simh itself are not related to licensing issues
> for PDP-11 operating systems.

Nobody said they were.  There has never been a license for SIMH.

> 
> Out of curiosity, was simh freely distributed while DEC was still alive
> ? If so, and if DEC did not send threatening lawyer letters to Mr
> Supnik, it would imply that DEC condoned this distribution.

Bob worked for DEC. SIMH was a personal project but as the law is
written, because it involved the work of his employer and knowledge
gained by his employment there the emulator would have been the
property of DEC.  It does not appear that DEC was interested and
the general understanding, as far as I know, was that DEC let him
take it when he left and relinquished all ownership claims to him.

> 
> Similarly, if the current owner of the PDP 11 software were torelease
> the source into the wild, and HP didn't even notice, it would mean that
> HP did not assert its rights over the software and thus it can become
> public domain.

And if they did he could find himself liable for millions of dollars in
fines and damages and possible jail time.

> 
> Remember that one reason large corps send threatheing lawyer letters to
> people isn't to prevent the type of use being made, but rather to
> maintain/assert onwership of the product/IP to prevent it from becoming
> public domain though lack of action to protect one's own IP.
> 
> So, if HP is unaware of its rights over PDP-11 or doesn't care, then
> making the source public domain should be easy, just publish it, and
> wait a few months to see if there are theathening letter from HP lawyers.

It is unlikely you would get a "theathening letter".  What you would
likely get is what we down here call a subpoena.  :-)

> 
> At worse, the web site that published the software would be told to
> remove the links to the source code immediatly. 

No, see above for "at worse".

>                                                  But my guess is that HP
> would go beyond that (especially if the software were already in the
> wild and on many many web sites.)

The further it was spread, the more damages they could claim!!  I, for one,
would not want to be the test case to see how this went.

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>