To Al Kossow at bitsavers

By the way, a draft of the post which follows was made available to Johnny over 12 hours ago. Some clarifications were made, but none of the facts that I mention have changed Just to set the record straight from my point of view (I very much doubt that either Johnny, Al or Dave will see it this way, but ...): Actually, I really don't specifically know any of the actual details which means that all I know about is the information provided by other individuals that Mentec USA sold what it owned to XX2247 LLC when Mentec USA stopped doing business. The other information is that Dave Carroll owns XX2247 LLC. And finally, the most important aspect of the information provided by other individuals is that when DEC made the agreement with Mentec, DEC retained ultimate control over the IP and it is very possible that for every license that Mentec gives out, DEC or its successors, which means Compaq followed now by HP must receive a specific amount of compensation. If that is the situation, then it would be rather straight forward at this point to exempt non-commercial and educational uses, especially since HP already participates in a program for VMS. By the way, in the above two paragraphs, I changed the word "rumours" (in the draft I sent to Johnny) to information provided by other individuals. Will HP do that? From all indications, it seems VERY doubtful since at this point it would cost HP the services of a lawyer and there would be no return. Good will on the part of the public no longer seems very important, so again, it seems doubtful about what HP might ever do. --------------------------------------------------------------- I digress a bit with some information which may be of interest! By the way, over a decade ago, I did some Y2K work for a TSX-Plus system which resulted in the purchase of an RT-11 and TSX-Plus licenses. And while I was able to manage the paper work for the TSX-Plus license, Mentec did not even respond to my many inquiries. I was not only unable to buy an RT-11 license from Mentec, Mentec would not even reply at all in respect to anything about the purchase of an RT-11 license, including the rather important question of the cost. The company for which I did the Y2K work is one of the largest in Canada and the name is known by everyone in Canada. I have no idea why Mentec refused to respond, but there is not much that can be done when a USA company decides to ignore requests for information in order to make a legitimate purchase. By the way, over two decades ago, I had a somewhat similar difficulty with DEC in respect of RT-11 licenses and software. By then, DEC had probably effectively shut down its RT-11 development group. When I mentioned that a new version of RT-11 that had just been delivered was under warranty and needed some bugs fixed, DEC was not even interested in finding out what the bug was, let alone in fixing the bug. Again, the company that I was consulting for was one of the largest in Canada. I mention these two experiences with DEC and Mentec since those experiences may have resulted in my being known by either DEC or Mentec, or both, as a difficult individual to deal with since I insisted on reputable adherence to the warranty which DEC provided plus up front details of what would be involved in the acquisition of an RT-11 license. Back to the reply to Johnny. --------------------------------------------------------------- In the past I have attempted to contact Johnny and while Johnny at least does respond to my many questions, Johnny doesn't know much more than I do. Except that it seems likely that Johnny and Al do discuss things some of the time and they probably both feel that my inquiries are causing a problem. As far as I can remember, Al may have responded to some of my questions in the past, but no longer even acknowledges that I have made a direct attempt to contact him. As for Dave Carroll, a few years ago I managed to locate where he worked and left a voice-mail. I asked Dave to return my call. I have never spoken to Dave nor have I ever received an e-mail The rest of my response is in regard ONLY to RT-11 since I have almost no contact with RSX-11 and only the occasional contact with RSTS/E. As far as trying various ways to put RT-11 into the public domain, about the only aspect of that which is explicitly true is a bug list for RT-11. Even that I don't host by myself, so if the internet site where the bug list is available had not make the bug list available, then no one else would know about those bugs in RT-11. And equally, I could have just included the Bug List in a normal post such as this one and the Bug List would then have been in the classiccmp archive. In any case, after a decade of requesting help and contributions of additional bugs in RT-11, there have been exactly ZERO contributions. In respect for the IP for RT-11 and having "tried various ways to put it into the public domain", based on the understanding of US law in that regard, doing so (at least as far as the arm chair legal opinions that have been expressed over the years) is actually impossible since the owner of any IP does not EVER need to take any action in the past against violators to take action in the present OR the future. At least, if you ask Bill Gunshannon and Johnny, I strongly suspect that will be the legal position of both individuals and I also suspect that for all practical purposes, both of them are probably correct. Even the present use of the SimH emulator to run specified versions of PDP-11 operating systems under a license by Mentec seems mute at this point since, as has been pointed out by a few arm chair lawyers, DEC no longer owns SimH. Consequently, it does not seem to be legal at this time to run any versions of the PDP-11 operating systems under SimH which were made available on a number of internet sites where there are no restrictions to download the image files for these PDP-11 operating systems. Of course, that also means that those same image files can also be run on real DEC hardware and that was possible immediately and neither DEC nor Mentec made any complaint at the time about that aspect. Curious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So, in the past, I don't believe that I have done anything different that anyone else has done in respect of RT-11, and probably less of it than at least a few individuals. I have probably asked questions and in many cases answered questions in respect of using RT-11 when inquiries were made. From my point of view, the single biggest part in the situation with regard to the IP for RT-11 is that all of the files for the binary distribution for V05.07 of RT-11 have been available on the internet for download by any individual who has taken sufficient interest to know where these files could be found. Further, even the critical Commented Source Code files for all but two of the applications have also been available. What made the major change in the past month was that even the link address to the internet site was recently made available for files which are available on the same internet site such that anyone interested in looking at those files could have found the files referred to above. I have VERY privately advised a few individuals of the existence of these files, in one case that advice was provided many years ago. So if the attempt on trying "to put it into the public domain" has taken place at all, I have certainly not been the individual to make the most successful attempt. I do have an opinion as to why and under what circumstances the above files were made available for download at that internet site, but since I have not been able to verify my opinion with Dave Carroll or Al Kossow, there seems no point in doing do since it is probably wrong. If I felt confident of my conclusions, as opposed to what Rod Smallwood suggested about 2 hours ago in his reference to Deep Throat, then I would have shared that conclusion. PROBABLY, ALMOST CERTAINLY NOT going to happen after almost 20 years when the expense to HP would be large and there is no public benefit for doing so at this point. Actually, in my opinion, I have been reasonably quiet about the whole situation and would have been even more so had I been advised about what is actually the true situation and what my contribution could be to help. And while I do provide specific help with RT-11 questions for individuals who are asking for that help, those individuals were already using RT-11 in whatever capacity before I answered. As for having made bug fixes and enhancements to programs which are in the RT-11 binary distributions, I believe I have followed a long line of individuals who did so in the past. Note that in my case, not one person has even been interested enough to actually ask for these programs. So I doubt very much that there has been any real harm. And since I am not the only person who has made changes to such programs (one individual made the changes and made the final executable program available for download on the internet), it seems rather interesting to say that I am using guerilla tactics when I am doing that same thing as others, but not making the changes available on a public basis. I invite any and all responses to this post to classiccmp and would appreciate a correction in respect of any facts which are incorrect. I certainly realize that I don't know what is actually in the original agreement between DEC and Mentec which was made around 1994. I do know that most of my attempts in the past to obtain information and help for problems with RT-11 have not met with any satisfaction from my point of view as far as both DEC and Mentec are concerned. On the other hand, my view of RT-11 software is that it is of the very best quality. And while there are still bugs in RT-11 and there are many enhancements that should be available, the only real complaints I have are: (a) The Date word has the bits for the year separated with the 5 low order bits and the two high order bits making up a 7-bit field for the year which obviously can't be used in sorting for the date as is (b) DEC would never share the outstanding bugs in the RT-11 operating system - while I do agree that their point of view was both valid and reasonable, that was still disappointing since it makes it so difficult to fix bugs that are unknown Jerome Fine