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.
