On Fri 01 Sep 2006 at 22:36:01 -0400, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> We have repeatedly been the victims of a particularly ugly kind of
> rumormongering, specifically claims that NetBSD is "tainted", contains
> source code we are not entitled to distribute, or so forth.  It is an
> unfortunate fact that for many years we could not effectively respond
> to those claims (which were false) because our agreement with the owners
> of the Unix source code, which required us to remove certain files that
> had been distributed by Berkeley in Net2 and 4.4BSD, had a binding
> confidentiality clause.

"Our" agreement? It was between between USL and The Regents of the
University of California, and The NetBSD Foundation or Project would not
be a party to it - unless it was part of the University. Specifically,
any confidentiality clause would not apply then.

The settlement has been made public by the Regents almost 2 years ago
now; see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20041126130302760 , so
I have read it (back at that time). The Regents were supposed to remove
some files and put different copyright notices in others, without
further comment; but anyone else could draw conclusions from those
actions (which has generally been done, most likely). A sensible
conclusion from those acts would be that everything based on 4.4BSD-Lite
would be safe.

Reading the settlement it turns out that the Regents were only
*encouraged* to have others made the same changes - they need not force
them, or at least that was an implication that has been drawn by some.
Also the Regents didn't even concede USLs claims on the files, given the
wording.

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert      -- You author it, and I'll reader it.
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl        -- Cetero censeo "authored" delendum esse.