On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 11:45, ron minnich<rminn...@gmail.com> wrote: > I wonder how many of the companies involved still exist :-)
i suspect ron knows all this already; this is intended for anyone else who comes along and thinks this might make getting 2e CDs out easier (instead of harder). again, this is all from my memory, mostly from discussions on 9fans. various people with more first-hand knowledge of the situation have spoken on the subject in the past; check the archives if you want a more definitive answer. the relevant companies were Sun, NeXT, SGI, and MIPS. One way or another, the Sun sources are available; i think, but am not certain, that Sun was asked and said okay (but maybe the original NDA just never had that sort of restriction). see extra/sun.tgz for the results. NeXT was acquired by Apple, who in legal terms became a successor entity (while I haven't seen the NDAs in question, that or similar is pretty standard language). While I was still at the Labs, word was that someone in 1127 (named at the time, but I don't remember now) with a good relationship with higher-up types there asked and was summarily denied. SGI bought MIPS, then spun them out again, but kept parts. No clear successor organization, which makes it likely that it'd be far more work on the part of SGI and/or MIPS to figure out who can even say "yes". even if there is a clear answer, neither company seems like they've got a lot of spare personnel to devote the the question. SGI's own NDA is almost certainly with SGI (sorry: sgi). that's probably the easiest of the three to deal with, if someone were really, really inclined. but really: don't be. these are kernels for very, very outdated platforms, some of which even eBay has trouble turning up. cobbling together a 2e-supported pc would no doubt be faster and cheaper - and you could likely get beefier results out of the deal. none of the described platforms even have modern equivalents in their line. sun was probably the closest here, and we've got that already. anyway, to ron's question, for those keeping score: Sun: released their stuff; recently acquired by Oracle. NeXT: acquired by Apple, ate it from within. MIPS: acquired by SGI. a smaller MIPS was then spit out when SGI realized Itanium was their future (oops). SGI: went backrupt, twice, then acquired by Rackable before the whole shebang was renamed sgi. i was going to say that having Plan 9 ported to your platform seemed like a bad omen for your company, but equally valid is the observation that being a platform vender (other than Apple) is bad for your company.
