AT&T's Korn Shell Source Code Released

Henk Langeveld writes, "This announcement can be found at kornshell.com: March 1, 2000: I am happy to annouce the the 'i' point release of ksh93 is now available for download. For the first time, source is available as well as binaries for several architectures. If you build binaries for new architectures, and send them to us, we can add them to the download site. The download page has been completely revised in a manner that hopefully will be easier to use. ksh93 is part of the ast-open package. tksh (ksh with tk support) is also part of this package. -- David Korn
As a long-term fan I'm glad to see the korn shell now being released under a new license. The license is quite non-standard, and does include some restrictions (changes can only be distributed as patches), but as far as I can see it does allow anyone to bundle binaries with their products. The distribution format is quite non-standard. The research group at AT&T has their own packaging system, built around nmake. "

Comments

Open Source license

[Bruce Perens]

We reviewed this on the license-discuss mailing list a long time ago. Everybody in the discussion at that time concluded that it was an Open Source license, although I don't think anyone was as happy with it as they would be with some of our simpler and less restrictive licenses. I doubt that OSI will certify it but that's up to them. They tend to reject most termination clauses.

I discussed the ksh source release with David Korn a while back, including the point that it was probably too late. He seemed to think that the original still had some features not available in pdksh or elsewhere.

Thanks

Bruce

But not DFSG free?

[Carl]

Debian legal doesn't seem to consider this license DFSG free. See the thread starting at http://www.debia n.org/Lists-Archives/debian-legal-0003/msg00009.ht ml. Not all messages are archived yet but the main points are:

• a "you must monitor our web site" clause
• a "you are responsible for ensuring that people you distribute the software to comply with this license" clause
• a "you must contact us if you distribute patches" clause
• an unilateral-termination clause
• a "you must adhere to U.S. law" clause

The 'ensure that others comply' and the 'Termination clause' seem very non-free, the others are only very annoying (especialy if you don't have easy internet access and live outside the US).

In other news

[Greyfox]

AT&T shares fell in early trading after the popular band "Korn" announced a lawsuit for trademark infringement. "It's obvious they're using our name. Who would have thought of spelling corn with a "K" except us?" commented a lawyer for the band. AT&T declined to comment on the suit.