14 Nov
2015
14 Nov
'15
6:20 p.m.
On 11/14/15 5:46 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Another thing that I don't know is if XX2247 would
possibly be required to pay a fee to HP for each license sold. It might be, which would
make it hard to even give licenses for binary distributions
tricky.
That is the crux of the problem. While XX2247 bought the rights from Mentec as the
corporation was dissolving, no one in Mentec actually HAD a copy
of the original agreement so the current owner doesn't know what the terms were.
Trying to chase back HP->Compaq->DEC has essentially become impossible
because the people who would have known aren't with the company any more, and HP
doesn't want to invest any time trying to find the agreement. That was
as far as I got working with HP's archivist, who has been incredibly helpful
negotiating non-commercial releases of software for the HP-developed product
lines and for Apollo. As Johnny said, someone on the inside who knows where to look would
have to deal with this.