Availability of RCS

[Walter Tichy]

A number of people asked me to clarify the RCS licensing issue.
There are currently three ways to obtain RCS:

1. It comes with Unix 4.2 (this is the preferred route).
2. You can request it from me directly.
3. You can request it from a company that has both an AT&T Unix
   OEM license and a Berkeley Unix license.

Distribution of RCS by anyone else is illegal. One of the reasons is
that RCS contains AT&T proprietary code (modified versions of
diff and diff3). Anyone giving copies away without the proper license
might be sued by AT&T (and WILL be sued if it has anything to do with
a product).

The good news is that I have developed a new diff program, which I
could incorporate into RCS to avoid AT&T licensing problems.
This new program, called bdiff, recognizes block moves, produces
smaller deltas, and runs faster than diff. Incorporating it into
RCS is work, so I'm not going to do it unless I sense reasonably
strong demand. Reply via mail.

-Walter Tichy
tichy at purdue
{ihnp4|decvax}!purdue!tichy