Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!strath-cs!jim
From: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sequent
Subject: Re: Dynix licensing
Keywords: license, user-limits
Message-ID: <296@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk>
Date: 3 Oct 89 17:18:19 GMT
References: <6006@wolfen.cc.uow.oz> <294@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk> <12288@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.strath.ac.uk
Reply-To: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk
Organization: Comp. Sci. Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Scotland.
Lines: 28

In article <12288@boulder.Colorado.EDU> rsk@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Rich Kulawiec) writes:
>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.
>
>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.

The 'problem' is not the availability or non-availablity of Sequent
source code. [We already have source code licences from AT&T and Berkeley
anyway.]

The problem is the anomalous way that licensing is handled. AT&T will give
source licences to educational users for a few hundred dollars. The same
educational users have to pay thousands of dollars in UNIX licence fees
(the bulk of which will ultimately go to AT&T) when they buy a system
like a Sequent. Why?

It is a Good and Noble Thing that AT&T supply cheap educational licences
for UNIX. It's a pity that UNIX vendors cannot do likewise, either because
they don't want to or because their agreements with AT&T prevent it.

		Jim