[Info-vax] State of the OpenVMS hobbyist program?

[Bill Gunshannon]

On 11/28/19 1:13 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 11/22/2019 2:04 PM, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 11/22/19 1:29 PM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>> For the same reasons that the legal situation around hobbyist licences
>>> for the PDP-11 have become unclear.
>>
>> The hobbyist license for the PDP-11 has never been legally unclear.
>> A license was granted to run old versions of the OSes on a specific
>> emulator.  That emulator was written by Bob Supnik when he was an
>> employee at DEC and it was apparently done as a part of his job as it
>> was recognized as DEC IP.  When Bob retired and left DEC he was given
>> that IP and it ceased to belong to DEC and thus ceased to meet the
>> requirements of the Mentec License Agreement.  No version of SIMH
>> since Bob's departure from DEC falls under the license and no real
>> hardware ever did.
> 
> The specific wording of the license would determine whether it was
> unclear or not.
> 
> I have not seen it, so I have no idea.

Sigh....  I really didn;t want to have to post this yet again, but....

> 
> You sort of managed to make it unclear in your description above.
> 
> "A license was granted to run old versions of the OSes on a specific
> emulator"

1  DEFINITIONS

SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY shall mean the binary versions of the PDP-11
Operating Systems (RT-11 V5.3 or prior, RSTS/E V9.6 or prior, RSX-11M
V4.3 or prior, RSX-11M PLUS V3.0 or prior), and associated utilities
and layered products that run on PDP-11 computers.

MENTEC'’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS shall mean MENTEC'’s patent,
copyright and trade secret rights in its SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY.

EMULATOR shall mean software owned by Digital Equipment Corporation that
emulates the operation of a PDP-11 processor and allows PDP-11 programs
and operating systems to run on non-PDP-11 systems.

2  LICENSE GRANT

MENTEC grants to CUSTOMER a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free
license under MENTEC's INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS to use and copy
the SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY solely for personal, non-commercial uses in
conjunction with the EMULATOR.



> 
> and:
> 
> "When Bob retired and left DEC he was given
> that IP and it ceased to belong to DEC and thus ceased to meet the
> requirements of the Mentec License Agreement."
> 
> are not the same. Is it the specific emulator or who owns the
> IP of an emulator or both that is the criteria in the license.

Look at description of EMULATOR above.  It was an emulator belonging
to DEC that was licensed.  That emulator was SIMH.  When Bob left DEC
he was given the rights to the emulator, which he had written, and it
ceased to be "owned by Digital Equipment Corporation" which was a
requirement of the license.  None of the current sources for the base
PDP-11 version of SIMH or any of the additional devices that have been
grafted onto it have any Copyright by or mention of "Digital Equipment
Corporation".

As I have stated numerous times in the past, there is nothing unclear
or ambiguous in the license agreement.  And that doesn't even take into
account the fact that none of those OSes are still the IP of Mentec and
therefore, none of them meet the requirements of "MENTEC's INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY RIGHTS".

Any attempt to try and stretch this in directions to justify the
use of the PDP-11 OSes in any way, on an emulator or real hardware
is just bad rationalization.

bill