mailx

[Rich Salz]

In <6703 at dayton.UUCP> joe at dayton.UUCP (Joseph P. Larson) writes:
>I was given a copy of mailx by someone who said they got it from someone
>who said it was public domain. ...

Up until 4.3Tahoe, UCB did not go to the trouble of individually
copyrighting every single file in their source tree.  This was done
because it was impossible for UCB to separate their code from ATT code, so
they had to treat the entire BSD distribution as if it were protected by
ATT's licensing arrangements.  This is probably the version that you got.

In the 4.3Tahoe release, Keith Bostic (and, apparently, Kirk McKusick, but
I've only had contact with Keith) did a great deal of work in getting
large portions of UCB code certified as being free of ATT code, and
therefore not subject to ATT licensing restrictions.  John Gilmore
helped, and Rick Adams did the grunt work of creating a release tape that
has no non-free code (I believe; maybe Keith did that, too).  With that
the UCB Mail program, called mailx when ATT started to provide it with
their releases, had a UCB Copyright on it.  The UCB Copyright is
basically "a freely-redistribute, don't use our name to sell it, don't
blame us if it causes you any harm" copyright.

The upshot is, the version you have is probably illegal, either it's
covered by ATT license or someone stripped out the UCB Copyright.  You can
get a more current version on UUNET or by buying a tape from FSF, or by
asking someone with access to either of those, or a 4.3Tahoe source tape.

Apologies to anyone I might have slighted in my "who did what" summary,
above.
	/r$
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