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