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In the 1980s, it was common for vendors to offer source licenses to their customers, at times for an additional fee. DEC sold customers the OpenVMS sources (Com
by skissane 4y ago
In the 1980s, it was common for vendors to offer source licenses to their customers, at times for an additional fee. DEC sold customers the OpenVMS sources (Compaq/HP continued the practice, and maybe VSI is keeping it up); IBM caused a lot of controversy in the early 1980s with the announcement that they were going to stop allowing customers source code access to MVS. Against that background, unsurprising that to learn that Sun sold source licenses to their customers for SunOS as well.
- trollian 4y agoMicrosoft did this with NT too, IIRC...
- skissane 4y agoI think Microsoft was a lot more restrictive with source licenses - generally only universities for research purposes (and Windows Research Kernel was never the full OS anyway), some ISVs with specially negotiated deals, and some government agencies. The average customer couldn’t get access to the source code. Whereas, OpenVMS for example, I think basically any licensee could order the source.
- wazoox 4y agoNT 3.5 and 4.0 on 4 (IIRC) and 8 processors machines required to be compiled from source on the target host, the shipping kernel only supporting 2 processors and cross-compilation not being an option. Fun times :)
- easton 4y agoMicrosoft still does this too, shared source is still a thing if you’re an important enough customer/vendor/university: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/