Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!ames!oliveb!pyramid!csg
From: csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T?
Keywords: OSF, AT&T, standards, competition
Message-ID: <25126@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Date: 29 May 88 07:48:10 GMT
References: <503@bacchus.DEC.COM> <54820@sun.uucp>
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 24

>> Read the operative words here: SVR3 license *DOES NOT ALLOW* you to
>> ship man pages.
>
>SVR3 tape *DOES NOT CONTAIN* man pages... We (Sun) signed a separate license
>with AT&T so that we could 1) get the S5R3 machine-readable documentation and
>2) ship documents - including machine-readable man pages - derived from those
>documents.

And the flexability is still there for the licensees. Note that although AT&T
has chosen not to bundle machine-readable man pages with SVR3, Pyramid and Sun
both do. I personally think it was idiotic the way AT&T handled the SVR3 docs,
but that was certainly *not* because of a desire to withhold information; just
AT&T's internal confusion about how to bundle their releases.

>> AT&T controls the content of you distribution. Anything you add becomes
>> the property of AT&T,
>
>I second Eduardo Krell's comments on this.

I third it. Pyramid has added many extensions to UNIX, as has any serious UNIX
vendor. Value-added is essential for product differentiation, and our lawyers
would never sign a license that required us to give that away.

<csg>