18 Oct
2011
18 Oct
'11
8:43 a.m.
vintagecoder at aol.com wrote:
The operating systems Eric mentioned are in the public
domain, but as far
as what I have been told, it is not because IBM didn't assert
copyright or
intentionally placed them in the public domain, but
because of U.S.
copyright law prior to 1980.
Prior to March 1, 1989, the effective date of the Berne Convention
Implementation Act of 1988. It is *exactly* because IBM didn't assert
copyright on the software; to assert copyright on the software would
have required placing copyright notices on the software, which was not
done. Whether intentional or not, the lack of those notices is what
resulted in them being public domain.
For years including MVS 3.8 you got almost all the
source just to be able
to do a sysgen. I was never a sysprog and never did a sysgen until a few
years ago, so I have no idea why they shipped it that way. But they did,
and everybody who bought a system got the OS to be able to do sysgens and
bring up their own system. That doesn't mean the OS and tools were open
source,
The provision of source code to a customer combined with the lack of
copyright is what made the tools open source.
I'm near certain if you didn't buy a system
and sign a license
agreement you had no legal way to get the OS or compilers.
Not true. Since there was no copyright, you could legally obtain a copy
from anyone else that had one.
There is nothing in the open source definition that requires that the
author of the software be willing to *personally* give you a copy on demand.
If not, it makes no sense to restrict manuals and make
a series of
manuals
only for licensed customers when the source code is
freely available.
It makes perfect sense. It is a business decision. In the 1960s it
wasn't even obvious that software could be copyrighted at all, but
manuals definitely could.
I have never heard that the source was available
without a license
which in turn requires a hardware purchase, I don't consider that
open
source.
If the software (including source code) is in the public domain, legally
available to you at no charge with no restrictions on redistribution,
it's not open source?
Whether IBM wanted it to be open source isn't the question.