Legal status of NetBSD
Charles M. Hannum
I've just reviewed this with Chris Demetriou, who actually talked with
USL, and I believe it's safe for me to say the following.
Our agreement with USL is as follows. Chris has a signed letter from
USL to this effect, but the following text is not an exact quote.
1) We must cease distribution of a certain list of files from Net/2
and files derived from them by July 31, 1994. [These files have
either been replaced with versions from 4.4-Lite, have been rewritten,
or were simply not in our source tree anyway.]
2) Further distribution of the aforementioned files before July 31,
1994 must include a USL copyright notice, as well as prominent notice
of the copyright and a list of restricted files in the `release
documents'. It was specified that NetBSD-current did not count as a
`release' for purposes of the latter restriction regarding `release
documents'. This does not apply to already packaged releases, though
we must cease distribution of those releases by July 31, 1994. [These
notices were added to our source tree, and thus to the code we were
actively distributing, very soon after the agreement arrived.]
3) Distribution of another list of files before or after July 31, 1994
is not restricted, but they must include a USL copyright notice.
[Again, these notices were added to our source tree. At least one of
these files was actually rewritten, derived from another version to
which this does not apply.]
4) There were no other restrictions.
Thus, as you can infer for yourself, NetBSD 1.0 is not encumbered by
USL.
(Now, I'd like to request that all of the people who had the nerve to
publicly rant about how `unclean' NetBSD is, GO AWAY. And I mean this
in the nicest way I can, considering how much of my time has been
wasted in this absolutely stupid and useless thread, and considering
how rude and insulting the statements and insinuations about us have
been.)
--
- Charles Hannum
NetBSD group
Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sun4c, mac68k, pc532, da30.
In progress: sun3, pmax, vax, sun4m.
Jeff Aitken
: Thus, as you can infer for yourself, NetBSD 1.0 is not encumbered by
: USL.
: (Now, I'd like to request that all of the people who had the nerve to
: publicly rant about how `unclean' NetBSD is, GO AWAY.
: And I mean this
: in the nicest way I can, considering how much of my time has been
: wasted in this absolutely stupid and useless thread, and considering
: how rude and insulting the statements and insinuations about us have
: been.)
You know, as a freely-available-BSD newbie, I have just sat back and
enjoyed the fireworks. But, enough is enough. In the immortal
words of Butthead: "Chill, Beavis"
The only reason your time has been wasted is because you are bound and
determined to have the last word. If you were concerned about time
being wasted, you wouldn't be reading USENET in the first place.
Why is it so goddam difficult to comprehend that the FreeBSD core-team
members had one helluva time dealing with USL, and don't want to go
through it again? All Nate and the others have said is that IF USL
WANTS TO PLAY DIRTY, YOU COULD GET SCREWED BECAUSE THERE WILL BE LAWYERS
INVOLVED!!! No one from the FreeBSD team (to my knowledge) said
NetBSD-1.0 was tainted. They simply stated that USL might try to say
it is, and this could cause problems. I can't understand why this is
causing such a flame war!! If you're complying with the agreement
you've reached with USL, great! I hope everything works out well for
you. But don't infer things that weren't intended.
I am heartily thankful for all the hard work that the *BSD folks have
put in. I appreciate being able to run a very nice OS on my PC for
free. I think free software is wonderful. But haven't you people got
more important things to do than flame each other every few weeks about
something as stupid as what *might* happen down the road, and *if*
so-and-so decides to do something, etc etc ad nauseum?!
I'll go back to watching the fireworks now, as this will probably have
no effect on anyone ;)
Jeff
--
Jeff Aitken jai...@vt.edu
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something stupid gets
peoples' attention
Bill Bogstad
>...
>Why is it so goddam difficult to comprehend that the FreeBSD core-team
>members had one helluva time dealing with USL, and don't want to go
>through it again? All Nate and the others have said is that IF USL
>WANTS TO PLAY DIRTY, YOU COULD GET SCREWED BECAUSE THERE WILL BE LAWYERS
>INVOLVED!!! No one from the FreeBSD team (to my knowledge) said
>NetBSD-1.0 was tainted. They simply stated that USL might try to say
>it is, and this could cause problems. I can't understand why this is
>causing such a flame war!! If you're complying with the agreement
>you've reached with USL, great! I hope everything works out well for
>you. But don't infer things that weren't intended.
As far as I can tell, in the USA the legal system allows any entity
to sue any other entity for practically any reason with practically no cause.
Given that both NetBSD and FreeBSD were both based on a release in which USL
now claims proprietary rights; I'm sure they could come up with some vague
claims which would at least allow them to reach a trial. I believe that the
case between BSD and USL (or BSDI and USL) were never actually tried so there
is no legal precedent here. It's not even clear to me if the final legal
agreements reached are even available to the public. Given that neither
NetBSD nor FreeBSD appear to have the financial resources to deal with even
the preliminaries of a trial; this might be cause of concern. On the other
hand, it appears the primary participants in the NetBSD group have a signed
statment from USL which they claim to be following and which removes any
concern about USL contamination. FreeBSD appears to have taken a different
tact. They threw all of their old code out and started with the BSD release
which USL had declared clean of contamination. My laymens opinion is that
you are probably 'safe' using either method. If this isn't sufficient to
alleviate your fears, consult your own lawyer or use Linux. Now can we go
back to flameing about whether *BSD or Linux are better operating systems?
:-)
A happy Linux user,
Bill Bogstad
bog...@cs.jhu.edu
Woody Jin
Bill Bogstad <bog...@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu> wrote:
> ... Good article about FreeBSD/NetBSD/USL law suit ... deleted.
>Now can we go
>back to flameing about whether *BSD or Linux are better operating systems?
>:-)
> A happy Linux user,
I thought that those two are oxymoron !!!
Did I start what you want ? :) :) :)
> Bill Bogstad
> bog...@cs.jhu.edu
--
Woody Jin
Scott B. Anderson
>claims which would at least allow them to reach a trial. I believe that the
>case between BSD and USL (or BSDI and USL) were never actually tried so there
>is no legal precedent here. It's not even clear to me if the final legal
>agreements reached are even available to the public. Given that neither
> A happy Linux user,
> Bill Bogstad
> bog...@cs.jhu.edu
Novell (USG) and BSDI *DID* go to court, the ruling (uncontested
by either side) was that BSDI had to use BSD 4.4lite code and
no code which ATT owned, just like the NetBSD agreement, only on
a different time table. No fines or damages were awarded, and BSDI
plans on a Thanksgiving (USA) release for its next version.
Scott Anderson
san...@carroll1.cc.edu
Richard Tobin
>Novell (USG) and BSDI *DID* go to court, the ruling (uncontested
How many times do I have to say this?
*There was no ruling.*
The case was settled out-of-court by an agreement between the parties.
>BSDI had to use BSD 4.4lite code and no code which ATT owned
BSDI *agreed* to switch to 4.4-lite, which they had planned to do
anyway!
There has been no court ruling on USL's claim. The closest was the
judge's refusal to grant USL a preliminary injunction preventing BSDI
from distributing their system, indicating that USL had not shown
that there was a "reasonable probability of eventual success" for
their claim.
*My interpretation* of the settlement is that USL saw that they would
lose the case (and maybe even have it declared that they had no
copyright in 32V), but could have dragged it out indefinitely which
would have had bad consequences for BSDI. As a face-saving measure
they agreed to drop the case immediately in return for insignificant
concessions from BSDI. The outcome was an almost complete victory for
BSDI and UCB.
If you want to verify the facts, you can get the relevant documents
by anonymous ftp from macbeth.cogsci.ed.ac.uk in /pub/usl-vs-bsd, or
by WWW from http://macbeth.cogsci/pub/usl-vs-bsd.
-- Richard
--
Richard Tobin, HCRC, Edinburgh University R.T...@ed.ac.uk
Ooooh! I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an
autonomous collective.
Ian McCloghrie
>In article <3199ok$k...@carroll1.cc.edu> san...@carroll1.cc.edu (Scott B. Anderson) writes:
>they agreed to drop the case immediately in return for insignificant
>concessions from BSDI. The outcome was an almost complete victory for
>BSDI and UCB.
If I remember correctly, the "switch to 4.4BSD and drop Net/2"
requirement was the only one of the terms which was made public.
The impression I got from the announcement that was posted was that
there were other terms which were not being disclosed to the public.
So... we don't know if it was merely "insignificant" concessions.
And I'm not sure it qualifies as a complete victory. A great deal
of work on 4.4 never got done because people were too busy dealing
with the court case and the lawyers, rather than writing and debugging
code. Which is why the whole encumbered vs lite thing came about in
the first place.
--
____
\bi/ Ian McCloghrie | FLUG: FurryMUCK Linux User's Group
\/ email: i...@ucsd.edu | Card Carrying Member, UCSD Secret Islandia Club
GCS (!)d-(--) p c++ l++(+++) u+ e- m+ s+/+ n+(-) h- f+ !g w+ t+ r y*
The above represents my personal opinions and not necessarily those
of my employer, Qualcomm Inc.
Geoff Rehmet
>In article <310u0n$k...@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu>,
>Bill Bogstad <bog...@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu> wrote:
>> ... Good article about FreeBSD/NetBSD/USL law suit ... deleted.
>>Now can we go
>>back to flameing about whether *BSD or Linux are better operating systems?
>>:-)
>> A happy Linux user,
> ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
> I thought that those two are oxymoron !!!
>Did I start what you want ? :) :) :)
Errm, excuse me, we have both happy FreeBSD and Linux users here, and
we have FreeBSD and Linux boxes talking to each other every day.
What's more amazing, is that we can manage this without bickering ;-)
Geoff.
--
Geoff Rehmet, Computer Science Department, | ____ _ o /\
Rhodes University, South Africa |___ _-\_<, / /\/\
FreeBSD core team | (*)/'(*) /\/ / \ \
cs...@cs.ru.ac.za, cs...@freefall.cdrom.com, ge...@neptune.ru.ac.za
Woody Jin
>In <317hcl$s...@masala.cc.uh.edu> wj...@moocow.cs.uh.edu (Woody Jin) writes:
>
>>In article <310u0n$k...@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu>,
>>Bill Bogstad <bog...@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu> wrote:
>>> ... Good article about FreeBSD/NetBSD/USL law suit ... deleted.
>>>Now can we go
>>>back to flameing about whether *BSD or Linux are better operating systems?
>>>:-)
>>> A happy Linux user,
>> ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
>> I thought that those two are oxymoron !!!
>
>>Did I start what you want ? :) :) :)
Hey, didn't you see the lots of smiley faces ?
>Errm, excuse me, we have both happy FreeBSD and Linux users here, and
>we have FreeBSD and Linux boxes talking to each other every day.
>What's more amazing, is that we can manage this without bickering ;-)
That's what Bill and I was doing :)
Woody
Chris Bitmead
>bog...@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu (Bill Bogstad) writes:
Out of interest, how did NeXT get out of being sued? Isn't it based on
bsd? Did they not use any disputed code or what?
Benjamin Z. Goldsteen
I believe they licensed AT&T (or whatever) a long time ago. Just because
they use BSD doesn't mean they didn't pay AT&T...
--
Benjamin Z. Goldsteen
Jon Cargille
Chris Bitmead <chr...@cssc-syd.tansu.com.au> wrote:
>
>Out of interest, how did NeXT get out of being sued? Isn't it based on
>bsd? Did they not use any disputed code or what?
>
NeXT's OS was based on Mach 2.5, which basically is a Mach kernel
which incorporates Unix pieces-parts in it. Mach 2.5 can't run at all
without those pieces, unlike Mach 3.0 which can run by itself.
Mach 2.5 has never been considered "free", and to get a copy of it
from CMU you have always been required to have an AT&T source license.
The non-unix bits were freely redistributable, but the unix-bits
weren't.
So NeXT never was using freely-redistributable BSD pieces, and
presumably they have always had the appropriate licenses with
AT&T/USL.
Jon
--
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
Jon Cargille jcar...@cs.wisc.edu
Want your .sig compressed? Reasonable rates
and fast turnaround. Call today!
Rick Kelly
: chr...@cssc-syd.tansu.com.au (Chris Bitmead) writes:
What some people may not realize, is that possession of any valid AT&T
license from 32V to the present is all that is required for pre-i386
BSD code.
--
Rick Kelly r...@rmkhome.com r...@bedford.progress.com