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From: Rick.Rashid@CS.CMU.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.os.mach
Subject: Re: Mach available outside US? How to order?
Message-ID: <kZOK7mq00jdXMdtqg0@cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 21 Nov 89 14:55:46 GMT
Sender: rfr@RFR.MACH.CS.CMU.EDU
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 34

For the 1,000,000th time:

1) To the best of my knowledge and CMU's knowledge there is not and has
never been any formal restriction on the export of Mach.  A number of
companies have exported Mach for the last 3 years and there are a number
of sites outside the US which are active Mach development sites.  This
point was driven home at the October Mach Workshop in Boston which was
sponsored by the Open Software Foundation which had a number of foreign
participants and presenters.

2) CMU and Mt Xinu will indeed be distributing Mach outside the US.  Originally
it was my policy to avoid dealing with the Dept. of Commerce and State and
paying lawyers.  This made a great deal of sense in 1987 when we started
distribution since we were (and are) distributing the software free of any
charge including a distribution fee.  With the announcement by the OSF that
they will be basing OSF/1 on Mach 2.5 we and our funding sources felt that
it would be appropriate to begin direct (as opposed to indirect through
companies) distribution outside the US.

3) Distributions of Mach release 2.5 are currently available from CMU and
CMU will always be a source of research versions of Mach for interested
systems groups in Academia and Industry.  We expect, however, that sites
both inside and outside the US that want "real" distributions of Mach
will get those distributions from Mt Xinu.  CMU does not have the staff
to do professional releases or to provide support or other services.
Mt Xinu should begin their releases in January (they have posted several
messages to this group about their releases).  Mt Xinu works very closely
with us (and in fact is doing this release under contract to CMU) and
has access to the most up-to-date kernels, servers and libraries.  Initially
their release will handle the same VAX, RT and SUN 3 platforms that we have
handled in our releases.  Both they and we expect, however, that a number
of other machine types will be added to that distribution over time.

-Rick