CP/M has been in a sort of legal limbo for quite a while – the code was openly available, but not through a license, but a short paragraph in an email that contained an odd piece of phrasing that wasn’t entirely clear, and could easily be misunderstood as “you can only distribute any derivative works through this one specific website”.
This has now been clarified by the rights holder – DRDOS, Inc. and Bryan Sparks, president of DRDOS… In an email. However, this time the wording is a lot more clear.
“Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right comes from the company, DRDOS, Inc.’s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all assets, dating back to the mid-1990’s. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in interest of Digital Research assets.”
This still is far from ideal, since a real license, e.g. MIT or BSD or whatever, would be easier, but at least this clears the waters quite a bit.
So now will this be begin the port of CP/M to all the platforms that don’t already have it? Ha, still should fire it up on my c128 one of these days…
It would be clearer to release it under a well-known OSS license, absolutely. Not sure why this halfway point – There can’t be much IP left in CP/M and the source has been available for quite a while now. While it was innovative (or at least state-of-the-art) for the time, that time was the late 70’s. Its fun to play around with today, and actually works very nicely in an emulator, but there’s not much commercial potential there, and whatever IP still remains is covered under patents I should think.
Patents expire after 20 years, so none would apply to CP/M.
True enough – and a good thing too. Thanks for the reminder.
C
IP and Patents are separate concepts.
Patents so exist so you can make your IP public and get guaranteed protection to its exclusive use… IP that you can keep secret without patents you can keep indefinitely at least until someone discovers how you do a certain thing.
Drumhellar,
“Separate” is a bit misleading. IP is an umbrella term for patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, etc.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/intellectualproperty.asp
I agree that patents were supposed to work that way. However in modern times it has become impossible for the patent office to thoroughly validate patent applications. They give their best effort but there is no guaranty at all that you will be granted exclusive use with a patent. These days the validation of patents is left to the courts and the process will probably cost millions for a competent legal team.
I think software should be protected by copyrights instead; it’s not a good idea to grant monopolies on math and algorithms.
Codeslave9000,
I agree with your points broadly, but all the CP/M patents would have expired long ago.
Edit: Drumhellar beat me to it.
Now I guess its time to work on my AMD64 port of CP/M that the world obviously needs.
You jest, but the thing is that there is a direct family line that went from this tiny Intel 8080 OS directly to several multitasking multiuser x86-32 OSes, and variants with a windowing GUI as well.
CP/M → CP/M-86 → Concurrent CP/M → Concurrent DOS → CDOS-386 → Multiuser DOS & IMS Real32
And also
CP/M → Concurrent CP/M → Concurrent DOS-286 → DR FlexOS → IBM 4680 OS & 4690 OS
And also
CP/M → CP/M-68K → Atari TOS → EmuTOS and FreeMiNT
There are derivatives of CP/M out there that are still worth money, and sadly for that reason I suspect we won’t see the whole thing under a truly FOSS license which *might* inadvertently affect the derivatives.
What most people don’t know is that MS DOS was a illegal clone of CPM. Digital Research sewed Microsoft and won more than 1 billion dollars in the settlement.
MS didn’t create MS DOS. Paul Allen knew a guy who was across the street that had made a clone of CPM called Quick and Dirty DOS. (disk operating system). Bill Gates heard Paul Allen mention it and Bill Gates knew that IBM was looking for an operating system to run their PCs and knew that the wife who co-owned Digital Research which owned CPM, could not get a hold of her husband who was in Canada hunting moose.
Before the husband could get back, Bill Gates tried to sell Quick and Dirty DOS or QD DOS to IBM as “MS DOS”. IBM didn’t want to buy it because “hardware is where the money is” and license MS DOS for their computers.
They then hired the guy that made QD DOS, had him make some changes like the name of the software and he got it to work with an IBM PC and the rest is history. Or so Microsoft would like you to believe.
Microsoft is one of THE biggest software pirate companies in the world. They plant moles in other companies in order to get source code for disk compression and many other forms of Intellectual Property. When the company sews they just keep appealing until the other company goes bankrupt and then buy the IP for pennies on the dollars. THAT is MS ethics. Why they didn’t want against Digital Research, I think is it is because the source code showed where they copied it from to the point that MS couldn’t deny anything.
Digital Research would have been Microsoft if only the husband had been there to sign the contract. Maybe they wouldn’t have been Microsoft. But neither would Microsoft. They used that money to create Windows which they wouldn’t have had without DOS.
I’m pretty sure that isn’t true.
Your story starts out with something highly apocryphal. And I can’t find any reporting of any lawsuit between DR and Microsoft.
CP/M-86 was actually available for the IBM PC at launch. IBM bought 100,000 copies to sell alongside the PC, which was sold without an operating system.
The issue was the licensing – CP/M-86 $240, rather than the $40 of MS-DOS. Everybody bought the cheaper option.
CP/M was largely a clone of earlier systems, such as RT-11. Many of the command names, file extensions (and the idea of 3 character extensions), command formatting, and batch scripting was largely copied from RT-11. The most significant differences were changing from drive identifiers to drive letters (DL0: to A:, for example) and a few changes to file extensions. Other than that (and the later introduction of hierarchical file systems), the 2 OSes work almost exactly the same. You could take someone who only ever worked with an RT-11 PDP-11 and plonk them in front of an ALTAIR running CP/M, and they would pick it up pretty quick.
Calling Microsoft “Software pirates” is a bit disingenuous, especially since QDOS is just a copy of an OS that’s a copy of another OS.