ms macro copyright?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <24478 at adm.BRL.MIL> stanonik at nprdc.navy.mil (Ron Stanonik) writes:
>A project here wrote some documentation using the ms macros (4.3bsd
>on a vax 11/780) and now they want to distribute the documentation,
>including the ms macros for those sites that lack ms (eg, sysv sites).
>Since tmac.s doesn't seem to contain any copyright statement either
>in 4.3bsd or sunos4.1, and since it was written (to our knowledge/ignorance)
>by ucb, not at&t, we suspect there won't be a copyright problem including
>the ms macros.

You're quite wrong; the -ms macros were developed by Bell Labs and shipped
with earlier releases of UNIX, including the one that 4BSD was derived from.
While various people may have "hacked" on the macros, the conditions under
which access to them was licensed preclude redistribution to other sites
that do not have corresponding UNIX (or Phototypesetter C) source licenses,
except by explicit arrangement with the AT&T software licensing people.

In general, you should not assume that any part of your UNIX system
software can be exported to other sites that don't have comparable
(source!) licensing, and if they do have comparable licensing, presumably
they wouldn't need you to send them the software in the first place.

Most UNIX software was, until recent years, protected primarily as
"trade secret" under restrictive licensing arrangements, which you are
legally liable for honoring in order to even be granted access to the
licensed material.  If your site administration is not making this
sufficiently clear to people granted access to UNIX, you should have a
little talk with them before they get your site into serious legal
trouble.  (The drawback to the trade secret approach to protection of
proprietary software is that it requires vigorous enforcement of the
licensing contracts.)