Stephen Harris wrote: > On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 03:15:27PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote: >> Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org> wrote: >> >> > Bash was bigger than ksh in the non-commercial Unix world because of >> > ksh88 licensing problems. Back in 1998 I wanted to teach a ksh scripting >> > course to my local LUG, but AT&T (David Korn himsef!) told me I >> > couldn't give people copies of the shell to take home. >> >> AFAIR, ksh was OSS (but not using an OSI approved license) since 1997. >> Since > > In 1998 each user had to sign a license; you couldn't give away copies > to other people. > > Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 14:09:30 -0400 (EDT) > From: David Korn <dgk at research.att.com> > > If you are going to make copies for use at your course there is > no problem. However, if users are to get their own copies > to take home with them, then we need to get each of them > to accpet the license agreement that is on the web. > > [ snip other options, including printing out the license and having > people sign it and sending the results back! ] Fascinating. As I'd been in Sun OS, and started doing admin work when it became Solaris, I'd missed that bit. A question: did the license agreement include payment, or was it just restrictive on distribution? Oh, and to clarify what I said before, our production shell scripts, in the mid-nineties, were corporately required to go to ksh. I didn't know bash till I got to CentOS (I don't remember it in RH 9...), and it's what I prefer (my manager and some other folks here like zsh), but bash lets me use all my c-shell-isms that I learned when I started in UNIX in '91. mark !se....