Dave wrote:
It's a shame there is not a law that allows software to be used freely
after x years of no new updates.

You are welcome to lobby your represntatives to change the copyright
laws.

I know Sun Microsystems have been helpful in supplying old software
(SunOs + others) to people that want to use it on old machines. But Cray
were not apparently. And from what I understand, its not as easy to copy
on a Cray.

There are two things wrong with this.

1. Sun has not been helpful supplying SUNOS for old machines, they have
only been less than agressive in enforcing their copyright.
However you will find that the sites that they have not gone
after are outside the U.S.

They will provide for free download Solaris (SUNOS 5) 8, 9 and 10
for download if you sign up (for free) and accept their restricted
license.

There is an open source version of Solaris 10, however that only supports
the UltraSparc II and later processors.

Solaris 7, which was available for shipping costs, was originaly released
at about $500 and derivative versions (e.g. Tadpole's) were never free.

Anything older is long gone, and not available from SUN.

2. What's left of Cray is owned by Sun. After Seymor Cray died, the
company went under and Sun bought them out. SUN produced a line
of "Cray" computers which had SPARC processors in them.

Note that many UNIX vendors had a license from AT&T that required
them to pay AT&T $60 for each workstation (2 or less users) or
$250 per server binary package they sold.

Sun in those days included a RTU "right to use" license for SunOS
when you bought a new computer, but technicaly it was not transferable.


Geoff.
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Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
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