18 Oct
2011
18 Oct
'11
5 p.m.
From: vintagecoder at aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 18, 2011 9:38 AM
It is in the public domain *now* because somebody
(Rich Fochtman) received
explicit permission from IBM along with the archive tapes, and made them
available on a web site. Since *at the time it was released* none of these
OS were posted anywhere and were shipped only to paying, licensed hardware
customers on tapes, it was not open source at the time.
"Public domain" does not equate to "open source"! The former is a
legal
status, the latter is a philosophy. The IBM operating systems have been
in the public domain (a legal status) since they were first published, due
the lack of any marking of the sources or object code or executables as
copyrighted--a requirement of the copyright law of the US as it stood at
that time.
DEC inserted copyrighting text into the object code as well as the source of
its programs, including operating systems, in the early 70s, unlike IBM. At
the time that DEC did this, it was a legal grey area, being argued in courts
as well as in trade publications, as to whether software *could* be given a
copyright. IBM fell on one side of the debate, DEC on the other, when it
comes to having marked their respective software libraries as copyrighted.
It was certainly possible, in the 1960s and 1970s, and even into the 1980s,
for anyone to obtain a copy of IBM's operating system sources. All it took
was a friendly systems programmer in an IBM shop. The reason more did NOT
escape was that, as a class, IBM-shop systems programmers were unfriendly
to budding hackers. They recognized that if just anyone got hold of a copy
of the system they were running, weaknesses could be found and exploited.
It was a paranoid time, what with radicals of all stripes running amok in
the streets, most of them convinced that computers were evil machines used
to keep track of their every movement.
There were no legal recourses for IBM against someone who did hand out the
sources, because the software was in the public domain (legal status) and
IBM could not assert ownership.
What Rich Fochtman apparently brings to the table is easy open access to the
sources. This is a philosophical win for the open source folks, but it is an
accession by IBM to the reality of the public domain status of those sources.
Just hoping to clear up an apparent semantic confusion.
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/