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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.unix,net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: RCS vs SCCS (RESULTS - LONG)
Message-ID: <2166@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 9-May-85 03:51:41 EDT
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Posted: Thu May  9 03:51:41 1985
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> I think Tichy's use restrictions are why the vendors did not include RCS.

I believe your statements about putting RCS on your other machines are
probably correct, but that wouldn't restrict vendors from offering RCS.
They already distribute binaries of "diff" with their machines, so they
could also distribute binaries of "rdiff".  I asked Tichy about distributing
RCS a while back (when I was at CCI - we weren't distributing it as part of
our system, even though we'd ported it and were using it heavily, because we
weren't sure what restrictions Tichy had put on redistribution) and I think
he said that you could redistribute it (in binary form) as part of a system
if you were distributing binary UNIX sublicenses with the system.

> Guy, does Sun offer it? If not, why not?

No, we don't offer it, nor do we use internally (sigh).  (We do use the SCCS
front end, which does sugar-coat it somewhat.)  We don't offer any of the
4.2BSD User Contributed Software except for netnews (I don't think we should
be distributing that, since it's the 2.10.2 that came with 4.2BSD and may
still have the line-eater bug, and since other people are already in the
"business" of distributing it).  I suspect it's either

	1) because somebody made a policy decision not to redistribute
	   that stuff because it'd add to our support burden or something
	   like that

or

	2) because nobody ever brought it up and nobody felt like
	   spending the effort to bring it up.

	Guy Harris