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

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-10-01 23:07, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> Bill Gunshannon <bill at server3.cs.scranton.edu> wrote:
>> In article <l2f81e$t0j$1 at speranza.aioe.org>,
>
> (snip, I wrote)
>
>>> 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.
>   (snip of wrench story)
>
>> 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.
>
> Which PDP-11 knowledge was available to employees, but not to
> general PDP-11 users? Well, I suppose only employees would know
> that, but usually the instruction set was well known, at least
> to assembly programmers, and that is mostly what is needed.
> I suppose also the locations of I/O registers and interrupt
> vectors, but that was also known outside DEC.
>
> Processor microcode might have been proprietary, but is normally
> not used in writing emulators, unless it is specifically
> desired to emulate the micro-engine.

Bob was on the team doing microcode for chips for the PDP-11...
You could say that he did have knowledge that was not generally available...

>> 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.
>
> Did they supply written release of ownership? Letting him take
> it doesn't necessarily release ownership, but might indicate
> that they don't claim exclusive ownership.
>
> But yes, to claim exclusive ownership he would have had to
> document both that it was personal time, and that only publically
> available reference sources were used.
>
> (and, again, IANAL)

I would assume that Bob do have some formal papers saying that he could 
take simh with him. But I have not explicitly seen any such 
documentation. On the other hand, I doubt that Bob would have tried to 
be sneaky about it with DEC.

	Johnny