Who was putting together the TSX+ archive?

[Lyle Bickley]

On Sunday 30 September 2007 15:58, Gordon JC Pearce wrote:
> On Sun, 2007-09-30 at 09:31 -0700, Al Kossow wrote:
> > > Is this already in the archive, or would it be useful?
> >
> > Lyle Bickley was putting together the software archive
> > unfortunately, he's no longer subscribed here.

I'm back in CCTECH as opposed to CCTECH - see below.

> > The TSX docs are under pdf/dec/pdp11/tsxPlus
> > and I have some manuals scanned from Feb 84.
>
> I put together a site for the TSX+ stuff and was waiting for the
> go-ahead to put it live, but then Lyle went silent.

Two reasons I went "silent". First, I've been absolutely swamped 
businesswise. That's both good and bad when you're a consultant. 
Good because you're getting $ and bad because your hobby life goes 
away.

Second - and equally important - I wanted us to have a different 
license for TSX-Plus. As originally agreed to by S&H, I needed to 
track "who" had TSX-Plus and had agreed to the personal license. The 
idea was to make sure that current commercial users (primarily gov) 
of TSX-Plus did not download the personal version and use it 
commercially - without any tracking.

The primary reason - I wanted personal users to have unlimited use; 
i.e., multiple system capability - so if you owned 10 PDP-11's 
capable of running TSX-Plus you could run them without violating the 
single user software or license restrictions.

It turned out that the only practical way to set this up was to have 
a "free" store, where one would agree to the license and then be 
able to download a multisystem version of TSX-Plus. That individual 
could NOT transfer the license nor could they give away a copy to 
anyone else.

At first it seemed O.K. to me. But in actually, it had a serious flaw 
- a single point of failure. Whoever owned the website housing the 
TSX-Plus "store" could go away for any one of a number of reasons - 
and the hobbiest community would be stuck w/o a legal source of 
TSX-Plus.

As a result, I have worked with S&H to create a new, more liberal 
license agreement - just in the last two weeks. It is still not 
"open source" - but it is modeled after the "Apache license". 

Essentially, the license will be included with the zipped binaries, 
docs, etc. It requires that the license be included (zipped) with 
every distributed copy of the binaries or documentation. The license 
includes TSX-Plus (Version 6.5), COBOL and RTSORT binaries and 
documentation in PDF form.

I plan to put everything up on one of my websites - and also, as time 
permits - add summaries of the many lessons I've learned in 
configuring and running TSX-Plus on Unibus and QBus systems. I also 
will provide reasonable free "support" for personal use as time 
permits - probably by developing an FAQ for TSX-Plus (help from 
others desireable).

With the new license, anyone will be able to distribute TSX-Plus as 
long as it includes the license agreement.

> Didn't know he'd unsubscribed though.

I got really frustrated with the massive quantity of "off topic" crap 
on CCTALK and unsubscribed. I recently subscribed to CCTECH.

>
> I built the site a while ago, so I'd be inclined to just start
> again and do it better this time...

Sorry for the miscommunication, Gordon. I did ping you several times 
- and didn't hear from you. I suspect it was because you got busy. 
Perhaps when you were freed up I got busy...

Regards,
Lyle
-- 
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"