[Info-vax] [Attn: HP Employees] PDP-11 OS hobbyist licensing
Bill Gunshannon
bill at server3.cs.scranton.edu
Tue Oct 1 15:51:12 EDT 2013
In article <l2f81e$t0j$1 at speranza.aioe.org>,
glen herrmannsfeldt <gah at ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
> 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.)
>
Except that a PDP-11 emulator uses knowledge gained as a part of
his employement. There is no way to separate that by when you
actually worked on the project. And, there is also the question
of what his employment contract said. And none of us will ever
know that. All we do know is that DEC let him take it with him
when he left and asserts no ownership over any of the subsequent
versions.
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>
More information about the Info-vax
mailing list