Article 6289 of vmsnet.pdp-11: All, I just received a very pleasing letter from Dion L. Johnson II, the Product Manager at SCO, about the legal status of the PDP UNIXs. I've included his email and my response below. If I can get a legally authorative statement on paper from SCO, I'll pass it on to you all, especially Steven Schultz. Cheers, Warren In atricle by Dion: > > SCO owns the licensing rights all versions of the UNIX system, or > so our legal folks tell me. Now, of course there are many > derivative, licensed versions, and some of the holders of those > licenses have rights to sublicense. In the case of BSD > enhancements, the Berkeley additions are owned by the Regents of > the University of California, and I believe the UCB license terms > are well known. > > As for your friends who have rescued ancient PDP machines... I > am confident that SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX > on these antiques without any payment to us. I cant quite > officially give that permission myself, but I can speculate that > SCO certainly would not mind. > > So go for it. Does this help? > -Dion >Dion L. Johnson II - The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. dionj@sco.com >SCO Product Manager - Development Systems and Various Other Stuff >400 Encinal St. Santa Cruz, CA 95061 FAX: 408-427-5417 Voice: 408-427-7565 Dion, thanks very much for your email, in fact I'm ecstatic! I know this could be a tricky legal minefield, so if possible could SCO draft a letter (and run it past their lawyers) which sets out exactly what you said above. In particular, you said that ``SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX on these antiques without any payment to us''. Does this mean I can legally distribute the source code to the PDP versions of UNIX, and to anybody? or just to people who own PDP-11s. There are PDP-11 emulators available, so it is conceivable that people who don't even have a real PDP-11 might like to try UNIX out on these emulators. If to anybody, then I assume this means the source is legally owned by SCO but freely distributable? I really appreciate your offer of making these old versions of UNIX available, but given the legal status of the code to this point, I would like to cover myself with an officially blessed and signed document from SCO. Let me know what you can do, and many many thanks again for this! Cheers, Warren