11 Mar
2020
11 Mar
'20
9:46 a.m.
On Mar 11, 2020, at 11:08 AM, Al Kossow via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
It should be noted that HP is not the only company that does this. CDC's successor
(BT) did the same with the 6000 series software, and for that matter the owner of PLATO
did this as well. Hobby, yes, open source for any purpose, no.
A company may close down, but that doesn't mean it is "gone" as far as its
property is concerned. Ownership passes to others, perhaps creditors or the like, or the
majority shareholder. Who that is may be quite hard to find out, which of course is
unfortunate if you're trying to get proper permission to do stuff with that property.
Then again, if the current owner is an individual, it may make things easier, once you get
past the hurdle of finding that individual. That was the case with PLATO recently.
paul
Years ago us SGI hobbyists were able to talk to
SGI about this and a huge problem SGI had with any kind of hobbyist
license for IRIX or turning it free is it's fully of licensed 3rd party stuff. But
maybe now that's it's expired, or all
the companies things were licensed from are gone.
Release of Classic HP3000 died for the same reason from the same company.
HP has no motivation to spend time/money to release this. Also, the only way CHM
was able to release what we did (HP1000, 68K 9000 and Apollo) was having
us release it only for non-commercial research/hobby purposes.