APR91: PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: COPYRIGHTS, COPYLEFTS, AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Berkeley Copyright License Recently, the trend at many universities and research institutions has been to permit access to university-developed code through simple copyright procedures which permit modification and redistribution with attribution. The copyright used by TeleMuse, for example, is similar to the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) copyright and is designed to be simple and direct; see Figure 1.

Figure 1: The copyright used by TeleMuse in the 386BSD article series

 /* Copyright (c) date, name-of-author.  All rights reserved.
  * Written by name-of-author, date-written.
  * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are freely permitted
  * provided that the above copyright notice and attribution and date of work
  * and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms.
  * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
  * IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
  * WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
  */

In addition, UCB copyrights currently prohibit use of the UCB name in products incorporating the software to avoid the appearance of an endorsement.

According to Marshall Kirk McKusick, UCB CSRG Research Computer scientist and president of USENIX; "We have the capitalists with their copyright and the radicals with their copyleft. We are at the 'copycenter,' since we allow redistribution with credit to the authors. Our goal is to have as many people as possible use our software." In January of 1991, CMU adopted a variant of the UCB copyright for the MACH operating system.

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APR91: PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: COPYRIGHTS, COPYLEFTS, AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Open Standards - Are they really "Open"?

> Berkeley Copyright License

Copyright vs. Copyleft

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PORTING UNIX TO THE 386: A PRACTICAL APPROACH

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