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

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Tuesday, 1 October 2013 19:56:04 UTC+1, Simon Clubley  wrote:
> On 2013-10-01, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
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> >
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> > Are you able to quote chapter and verse wrt "emulators owned by DEC"?
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> >
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> Yes. I have a copy of that licence and went looking for it online. This
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> was the first link I found after searching for text in the licence:
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> http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2003/01/msg00039.html
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> If you want it in it's original context in which most people would have
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> first seen it (you may need a magnifying glass :-)):
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> http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/pdp11emu.html
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> 
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> > I was aware of goings on related to a couple of PDP11 emulators inside DEC,
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> > and neither of them was SIMH. Doesn't mean that SIMH activity wasn't going on
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> > in parallel, mind you. But I have no recollection of word of DEC offering SIMH
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> > ever reaching UK customers.
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> The licence says _owned_ by DEC. It doesn't say anything about been _sold_
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> by DEC. :-) It was a personal project by it's original author while a DEC
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> employee.
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> Simon.
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> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
> 
> Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Thanks for the links.

The non-SIMH PDP11 stuff I was aware of was being looked at as part of a *commercial* offering from DEC. I'm not personally aware of anywhere it actually sold, but that doesn't mean it didn't get sold somewhere and no one told me (or I fogrot).

SIMH is an emulator framework. There's no obvious reason why (say) the Z80 stuff would require DIIGITAL INTERNAL USE ONLY knowledge. But in principle maybe the framework might. 


Much of the DEC stuff in SIMH VAX and PDP is widely documented in published documents which were at one time widely available (many of them still are online, thanks guys!).

Anyway we're talking about legal stuff here. There's no reason to expect the law to relate to what makes sense to real people.

Even where external published documentation didn't exist, creative use of intelligence and resources such as diagnostics could go a long way (though use of diagnostics for this purpose might or might not be covered by licences).

I'd better not even start thinking about the legal state of (T)MSCP in this picture.

Murky in here isn't it.