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Comment by tingletech | Hacker News Reader

> The first copy we know to make it out of Berkeley was to Tom Ferrin at UCSF on the 9th of March in 1978. The license was signed on the 13th, the media was an 800 bpi tape, and on the tape was the “Unix Pascal system” and the “Ex text editor.”

UCSF and UCB (as well as all the UC campuses and enterprises) are technically the same legal entity, incorporated by article 9 section 9 of the California constitution. Strange that they signed a license, when I worked for the regents we called them MOUs if it was a "contract" with another part of ourselves.

When I started working for UCSD and found out we were licensing BSDi for some boxes I was sort of confused, like why don't we get that for free?

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Tom was my manager for a while when I was a programmer at UCSF (~20 years after this event). He ran the Computer Graphics Lab which had a bunch of SGIs and DEC Alpha servers to do molecular modelling and I was 'the first linux guy in the group' (they asked me why I used linux when bsd existed). I remember him saying that whenever he licensed a commercial UNIX he insisted the contract include a section giving him access to the source code for the kernel ("because you never know when you will have to recompile the kernel or debug a kernel-space problem").

He's also known for presenting at USENIX on how to enable a hardware-disabled (but physically present) instruction on a cheaper version of the PDP/11. You'd cut a trace in the microcode and add a jumper wire, and presto! you had a fast floating point instruction that was previously disabled.

I always thought there was quite a contrast between UCB giving away BSD versus UCSD making its p-System a commercial product. In the short term, it was probably good for UCSD, but in the long term, the p-System is all but forgotten while BSD trucks along.

I thought BSD being free was part of the consent decree from AT&T vs Regents. The technology transfer office would never sign off on open source license, even in the early 2000s. You would have to make and end run around them to office of general council to start a new open source project, once granting agencies started requesting open source. Even if you did end run around tech transfer, you could not use a license that mentioned anything about patents (UC does not want to give away patents, but giving away copy rights was permissible)

We get to have its influence on Smalltalk, JVM, MSIL, DEX, and all those that think WASM is the first of its kind.

Hmm, which came first, the p-System or ZIL?

-checks-

Add ZIL to that list as well, as the p-System dates to 1977 and ZIL to 1979.

> MOUs

MOU = Memo of Understanding?

(Which are typically non-binding but formalized acknowledgement of intent)

yes, we were told we could not contract with ourselves, so we had to do memorandums of understanding when we had revenue or other agreements between units.

We also had a policy to follow state law (which does not apply to UC unless UC is specifically mentioned in the law).

Is UC federal land or something?!

As noted above, the University of California is given special status by a section of California constitution, so it has special status through that. It's presumably clauses like that fact it's governed by the Regents "...subject only to such legislative control as may be necessary to insure the security of its funds and compliance with the terms of the endowments of the university..." that mean it isn't normally affected by new laws.

(https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...)

All that said, parts of UC are indeed on federal land. Berkeley Lab, for instance.

Berkeley Lab / LBNL is on land owned by the UC, but all the buildings are owned by the feds.

Livermore / LLNL is fully owned by the feds.

And it has its own police, of course.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/fd/c8/c0fdc8612e07d7562b25...

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