Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!rsk From: rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sequent Subject: Re: Dynix licensing Summary: Possible rationale for no kernel sources Keywords: license, user-limits Message-ID: <12288@boulder.Colorado.EDU> Date: 2 Oct 89 15:15:59 GMT References: <6006@wolfen.cc.uow.oz> <294@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU Reply-To: rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec) Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder Lines: 21 In article <294@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> jim@cs.strath.ac.uk writes: >I find it distasteful that this policy means that university departments >like ours have to pay enormous sums for a Sequent UNIX distribution >that's binary only. It is all the more galling when AT&T will gladly let us >have a source licence for the same machine for a few hundred dollars. I don't purport to speak for Sequent, but if I were in their shoes, I'd keep tight control on the parallel kernel sources. As far as I can tell, that's where most of their technology edge lies; it's my opinion that Sequent's kernel is the cleanest/most elegant/best multiprocessor Unix kernel on the market. (Yes, I've read the sources; the site at which I used to work had a Dynix source license and I signed the non-disclosure agreement.) I guess I see it as a key point of Sequent's competitiveness. One approach which will partially solve your problem would to buy an AT&T source license and then send it (with whatever fee it is these days) to Berkeley for a 4.3 BSD source tape. At the utility level, the BSD and Dynix distributions are reasonably close. I know that this isn't an all-encompassing solution to the problem, but it may help. ---Rsk