Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Minix reading/writing non-Minix file systems (SunOS?)
Message-ID: <1990Oct9.225725.14981@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <32883@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: Tue, 9 Oct 90 22:57:25 GMT

In article <32883@nigel.ee.udel.edu> pezely@cis.udel.edu (Daniel Pezely) writes:
>Wouldn't it be convienent if machines running Minix, which had a file
>system on a SCSI drive, could read Berkeley (or even SunOS) file systems?
>First of all, would that be legal?  (Assuming the site had a BSD,
>SunOS, AT&T, etc license, of course.)

Provided that one can know the format without violating nondisclosure --
practical for all the systems I'm aware of, since they generally don't
mark the manuals top secret, just the code -- then licensing is not
required if you write your own code to read their format.

This is just as well, because licenses generally cover *specific CPUs*,
not all machines at a site.  Even Unix "site licenses" normally include
a list of CPU serial numbers, and new ones have to be added to the list
before they are legitimate.

>But more importantly, how difficult would that be to pull off?

Writing your own code to read Berkeley/Sun filesystems (the differences
are minor) would not be trivial but would not be prohibitively hard.
If you want to be able to write the filesystem as well, that gets rougher,
because Berkeley storage allocation is complicated.

Porting existing Berkeley/Sun code to Minix, which is what you'd really
need the license for, would be hard.
-- 
Imagine life with OS/360 the standard  | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
operating system.  Now think about X.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry