But still, CP/M was, for a while, the industry-standard microcomputer OS, making Digital Research a powerful and important company. Wealthy companies that lose dominance over a market they formerly controlled don’t tend to just give up. Digital Research put a substantial R&D effort into expanding and enhancing CP/M, creating a large family of OSes. It had some significant wins and big sales. Some of those products are still in use. All those products are arguably “CP/M derivatives”, and as such, Bryan Sparks’ 2001 edict might have just open-sourced them all.
One of the many giants we lost along the way.
Oh cool — that is one of mine. 🙂 The story was prompted by a reader’s point in response to this one:
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/15/cpm_open_source/
… the new, rephrased agreement from last month, rather than 2001’s sharing agreement.
Some great articles over there Liam, love your work.
Thank you very much!
Bryan Sparks can’t open source derivative code owned by someone else.
Is it as clear-cut as that?
For instance, what if they were a non-exclusive sub-licensee who licensed code from DR, which no longer exists but whose IP is owned by Caldera/Lineo/DeviceLogics. If the sub-licencee then goes out of business, would the rights not revert to the owners of the IP?
In general, no. In general, copyright would be held by whoever made those changes, and if they were going out of business, the normal thing would be for those copyrights to be sold. We see these sales all the time; I mean, we’re in 2022 talking about whoever owns CP/M, because somebody does.
However, note that a license implies some form of contract, which can say anything. The general rule doesn’t count for much without knowing how the sub-licenses are structured.
Personally I’m most interested in 4690, being something I worked with two decades ago. But that’s almost the opposite of this hypothetical, because the derivations are presumably owned by IBM which still exists. Although it may be technically possible for IBM to have signed something allowing Bryan Sparks to release their source code, that seems incredibly unlikely for any entity with a competent legal department.
Toshiba also has apparently updated 4690 as recently as 2020… crazy huh.
Yes indeed — I think I linked to one of the release notes in the article. It isn’t (quite) dead yet. 🙂
OK, fair enough.
Well, because I thought someone had to, before publication, I tried to contact Citrix, IBM, Siemens, IMS, and various other companies I mentioned, to ask what they thought and whether they’d agree to release the code.
Citrix, Siemens, IBM, and so on — all the big companies — did not reply.
One of the directors of IMS found me and he likes the idea, but they sold the company. The new owner did reply, but after I explained why, no more emails.
Everyone knows that MS DOS was actually an illegal close of CP/M, right? The answer is Yes and Digital Research won a lawsuit against Microsoft about this.
That’s a myth. It literally didn’t happen.
You mean “clone” not “close”, right?
If so, I think you are confusing or mixing up faintly-recalled info.
MS-DOS is the MS version of what IBM sold as PC DOS. MS produced that on very short notice by licensing (note, *NOT* buying) 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products. That was originally called QDOS, for Quick’n’Dirty OS.
Tim Paterson wrote QDOS based on studying the docs for CP/M and CP/M-86. It was API compatible, but used a different disk filesystem: Paterson used the FAT format of MS’ standalone disk BASIC.
It was wholly-new code, but written to be closely compatible with DR’s published info about CP/M.
That is not even reverse-engineering. Indeed CP/M-86 was released late and it didn’t even exist to be reverse-engineered yet, AFAIK. QDOS was written for and sold with SCP’s 8086 cards in 1979; CP/M-86 did not ship until 1981.
Writing compatible code to a published API is what APIs are for. That’s why the info is published.
QDOS wasn’t a clone of CP/M-86; in fact, it is older than and predated CP/M-86.
It was a compatible OS written to info DR published. That is entirely legal. DR published the APIs intending this for app writers, not for people writing OSes compatible with DR OSes, but it’s not breaking any rules.
In fact in the late 1970s there were lots of CP/M clones out there, such as CPN and Cromemco CDOS and many others. Later MSX-DOS was a much-enhanced CP/M clone.
The difference is, most other companies cloned CP/M on 8080 or Z80. SCP did it on 8088/8086.
But while yes, it’s arguably something like a clone (for different hardware, with a different file system), it was just one of many and didn’t use anything illegal or violate any licenses.
The key thing is that QDOS ran on then-modern hardware with a future. Most of the others ran on what was rapidly becoming obsolete hardware. SCP QDOS became 86-DOS became PC DOS and MS-DOS, and sold in the tens of millions of copies, and made MS huge amounts of money.
DR and IBM made big bad mistakes and it cost them dominance of their industries and lots of money. MS was smart and got lucky and got very very rich.
Later on, MS abused that power repeatedly, stole code, copied ideas, unfairly pushed rivals out of business, and generally became a bully and a criminal. MS effectively killed Be, Netscape, and Central Point Software; it crippled Aldus and STAC; and many more.
But DR survived and briefly it staged a successful comeback, before being bought by Novell.
I entirely understand how angry Dr Gary Kildall was. It was justified. But he did make mistakes. Sadly some of them are only clear in hindsight. DR should have rushed to make CP/M-86 quickly for IBM, and reserved the rights to sell it to others, as Microsoft did. DR should have sold single-user single-tasking CP/M-86 cheaply, building the market, and made Concurrent CP/M the premium product. It should have sold GEM cheaply to get wide adoption. It should have made standalone single-user multitasking CP/M a desirable power-user OS, rather than aiming at the multiuser market, which was on the way out as PCs got cheaper and cheaper.
But as little as I personally like MS, in how it cornered the market and became rich, it did it by being clever, and fast, and outmaneuvering bigger, slower rivals, and there’s nothing wrong with that.