29 Jul
2020
29 Jul
'20
11:27 a.m.
On 7/29/20 2:01 PM, Antonio Carlini via cctalk wrote:
You were free to use any. As it turns out, there was only one.
On 29/07/2020 15:21, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk
wrote:
DEC gave it to Bob Supnik as he had been the one who created it,
developed it and maintained it. I don't believe they ever had any
interest in it and it was only theirs because Bob had done it
while in their employ. When he left they had no interest in it
and let him take it with him. A quick glance at the source will
show no DEC Copyrights and Bob's from 1993 onward.
It also only covered SIMH until Bob Supnik left DEC.
"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."
Note that EMULATOR is highlighted with capitalization.
" 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. "
Here it is defined.? "owned by Digital Equipment Corporation".
That condition ceased to exist when Bob left DEC and DEC allowed
him to take SIMH with him.
Why? I can't find (after several minutes of searching) exactly what
happened when Bob Supnik left DEC.
Did DEC give him the software or did DEC release it under the "modified
X-Windows " licence? If the latter,
then DEC continued to own it and the PDP-11 release continue to be legal
to run under SIMH. This is plain English.? One does not need to be a
lawyer to see
what it actually says.? They were very explicit in their wording.
One *always* needs a lawyer! They were clear, although they don't seem
to have said *which* DEC-owned emulator.
I just don't see that you can immediately dismiss the possibility that
DEC still owned the software.
That question was asked and answered decades ago. Might be able to
still find something on the web, but the notion that the web keeps
things around forever is facetious at best.
DEC certainly permissively licensed other code. The OpenVMS BLISS
compiler was released on the Freeware CD, but I bet DEC still thought
they owned it.
The history of SIMH has never been in question. Except by people
trying to rationalize using DEC's (and later Mentec's) IP without
permission. Some things never change.
bill