Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible [LWN.net]

Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible

Posted Aug 26, 2010 23:01 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
Parent article: Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible

Heh. Great story.

So the problem was this restriction:

Users [...] are not authorized to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or program developed by the user.

Hard to see what the point of the restriction was. Simon Phipps' blog (linked by Callaway) is interesting too. The code was so old, no one in Sun could claim to be the authority on its ownership.

to post comments

Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible

Posted Aug 26, 2010 23:41 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Speaking as an Old Guy: we simply didn't know any better then. We commonly posted code to the net with some note like

Copyright (c) 1986 by Sam Spade. You can do anything you want with this as long as you don't make money off it or pretend you wrote it.

This was thought of as very permissive, but it isn't DFSG-free (the "free as in price" vs "free as in freedom" concept hadn't sunk in yet).

As for Sun's thinking, I think they wanted everyone to get the official version from them (Sun) while still allowing the freedom to package the code with other products if necessary.

Callaway: The long, sordid tale of Sun RPC, abbreviated somewhat, to protect the [guilty] and the irresponsible

Posted Aug 27, 2010 1:19 UTC (Fri) by yuhong (guest, #57183) [Link]

Yep, semi-free software. Even Linux kernel itself was originally licensed that way in the very early days like Minix was.