This is my favorite bit of early-UNIX history trivia: When AT&T donated the V6 source code to Berkeley, it was classified as industrial waste for tax purposes.
As it was explained to me, the law at the time said if your business produced byproducts that had economically recoverable value, you could get a tax break by donating them.
So, for example, if you were Kodak, and your film factory produced effluent with silver dissolved in it, you could get a tax break by donating it to someone who’d recover the silver.
AT&T being the Phone Company, they were forbidden to commercialize anything not directly related to telephony. UNIX was a byproduct of their research work, and they couldn’t sell it. But they could give it away as sludge!
Just oral history. I heard the story from Bruce Steinberg, who was VP of marketing at SCO when they were negotiating Xenix and SysV licenses. He said he’d heard it from AT&T people. (He’s passed on now, though, I can’t fact-check it.)
Way back when, DEC would occasionally throw out lovely bits of test equipment etc., which of course we as poor college students coveted. But as soon as we asked for the stuff going in the dumpster, it suddenly acquired value, so they couldn’t throw it away.
Odd. Because USL (Unix System Laboratories a subsidiary of AT&T after forced divesture, dating back to 1973 USG) and AT&T jointly sued Berkeley over intellectual property rights. Berkeley won because court decided AT&T failed to put proper copyright notices on the code.
Yes, that was after the divestiture when they were free to go into the software business and didn’t want competition from BSD.
Before divestiture, they were licensing it for free, and figured out a cute way to get a tax break out of it. (Or, so I heard third-hand.)
Donated? Back then Universities could get an academic license for the price of a mag tape. I was at the University of Waterloo, and we had v6 and v7 licenses. One guy actually downloaded the source for v7 over a telephone line without (ahem) permission.
Yep, and (or so I was told) every University that got a copy was another write-off for Ma Bell.
University could get a License to work on it as a research, More Features and Bugs fixed where added to it, They weren’t allow to call it Unix, And the BSD got it project of TCP/IP implementation from DARPA, When AT&T striped the BSD Project and decided to sue.
That’s not a neckbeard story, it’s a graybeard story. VERY different. Graybeards hacked Unix in the 70s and 80s. Neckbeards “studied the blade”.
Gravis “i think every day about how cable internet is IP over MPEG.
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