John, (01)
Sorry that we didn't have a chance to talk after the meeting.
Thanks for offering to talk with Lou Platt at Boeing about the
legal status of NLS/Augment. I'm glad that you and Jonathan
Cheyer had a chance to talk about it in advance. (02)
We'd really like Boeing to place NLS/Augment into the public
domain, including copyrights and any other kind of IP. We
discussed other kinds of licenses, such as a "hobbyists" only
license (as DEC did with TOPS-20), GPL, and various open
source licenses. We concluded that none of these types of
licenses would serve the goals of preserving NLS/Augment
and making it widely available as well or as simply as putting
it in the public domain. (03)
In conjunction with the NLS/Augment license issue, we also
discussed the licensing status of TOPS-20, which is the OS
under which NLS/Augment runs. As I mentioned, DEC made
it available under a peculiar "hobbyists" only license. We'd
like to recommend contacting HP to determine whether they
would entertain releasing TOPS-20 to the public domain.
While not as urgent as the NLS/Augment license, it is an
impediment to making NLS/Augment widely available. We
think that it is something HP might be willing to entertain,
and that you and the museum are in a unique position to
initiate this discussion. (04)
Peter, Jonathan and I would be happy to meet with you to
discuss this and give you whatever background information
you need to approach Boeing and possibly HP. Please let
us know what we can do to help on this. (05)
Philip Gust
Nouveau Systems, Inc. (06)
phone: +1 650 961-7992
fax: +1 508 526-8142 (07)
mailto: gust@NouveauSystems.com (08)
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