Hi, On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 3:57 AM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I went around this elsewhere with a guy who is doing a replacement for > the Busybox package with the first target being Android. (Android > developers are using what he is doing internally.)
I assume you mean Rob Landley and Toybox. (But no, I'm not directly familiar with him beyond that.) > One missing piece > was awk, which is required by various other things. Awk was written > at AT&T Bell Labs by Alfred Aho, Thomas Weinberger, and Brian > Kernighan as a component of Unix. AT&T Bell Labs was spun off an > became part of Lucent Technologies. Lucent later merged with French > telecom outfit Alcatel. IIRC, Plan9 was dual-licensed under GPL in one recent release. I remember pointing one guy to it on BTTR. Of course, maybe you're right, that doesn't directly apply to the AWK included itself. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7232042 * https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/btl.mirror/ Maybe he could use MAWK? (I forget if that's GPL, though, which is presumably the whole thing to avoid here. Oops, Debian says it's GPLv2, so ignore that.) Actually, old Minix2 had an AWK, presumably BSD-licensed like the rest of the OS. But maybe it's too buggy? * http://download.minix3.org/previous-versions/Intel-2.0.4/ > Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's original source for awk is available. > Brian is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University these > days. I asked, and *he'd* be delighted if it got used for this, but > while the source is available, the *rights* are up in the air. > Technically, Alcatel/Lucent currently holds them, but no one there is > likely to even be aware of it and heaven know what would happen if > they were asked. It would seem strange that FreeBSD (et al.) use it in "base" with no worries, but Toybox can't. * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=awk&sektion=1 I gather it's probably par for the course for universities or companies to "own" software written by its employees, but it seems pointless here. I assume they are all already aware whether they explicitly were compelled to sign off rights to AWK itself, especially Brian himself. Legal gray areas are annoying, but they do happen. I don't think asking Alcatel/Lucent for clarification would hurt, especially if you have no other (obvious) answer. > The chap doing the Busybox replacement has been around the licensing > block on other stuff, and won't use it unless he has clear documented > legal rights to do so, so he's going to have to roll his own awk > implementation. I sympathize, and he's a smart guy, so he'll probably figure it out. Though I'm not aware of any heavy use of AWK that would be impossible to rewrite. I mean, rewriting a few scripts can't be harder than rewriting an entire interpreter from scratch, can it? (Note that my use of AWK has been very minimal, almost nonexistent. It's still very useful, but I gather most people prefer other tools.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
