On 29/07/2020 15:21, Bill Gunshannon via cctalk wrote:
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.
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.
Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
