1
2 $FreeBSD$
3
4This is the C indenter, it originally came from the University of Illinois
5via some distribution tape for PDP-11 Unix. It has subsequently been
6hacked upon by James Gosling @ CMU. It isn't very pretty, and really needs
7to be completely redone, but it is probably the nicest C pretty printer
8around.
9
10Further additions to provide "Kernel Normal Form" were contributed
11by the folks at Sun Microsystems.
12
13++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
14> From mnetor!yunexus!oz@uunet.UU.NET Wed Mar 9 15:30:55 1988
15> Date: Tue, 8 Mar 88 18:36:25 EST
16> From: yunexus!oz@uunet.UU.NET (Ozan Yigit)
17> To: bostic@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
18> Cc: ccvaxa!willcox@uunet.UU.NET, jag@sun.com, rsalz@uunet.UU.NET
19> In-Reply-To: Keith Bostic's message of Tue, 16 Feb 88 16:09:06 PST
20> Subject: Re: Indent...
21
22Thank you for your response about indent. I was wrong in my original
23observation (or mis-observation :-). UCB did keep the Illinois
24copyright intact.
25
26The issue still is whether we can distribute indent, and if we can, which
27version. David Willcox (the author) states that:
28
29| Several people have asked me on what basis I claim that indent is in
30| the public domain. I knew I would be sorry I made that posting.
31|
32| Some history. Way back in 1976, the project I worked on at the
33| University of Illinois Center for Advanced Computation had a huge
34| battle about how to format C code. After about a week of fighting, I
35| got disgusted and wrote a program, which I called indent, to reformat C
36| code. It had a bunch of different options that would let you format
37| the output the way you liked. In particular, all of the different
38| formats being championed were supported.
39|
40| It was my first big C program. It was ugly. It wasn't designed, it
41| just sort of grew. But it pretty much worked, and it stopped most of
42| the fighting.
43|
44| As a matter of form, I included a University of Illinois Copyright
45| notice. However, my understanding was that, since the work was done
46| on an ARPA contract, it was in the public domain.
47|
48| Time passed. Some years later, indent showed up on one of the early
49| emacs distributions.
50|
51| Later still, someone from UC Berkeley called the UofI and asked if
52| indent was in the public domain. They wanted to include it in their
53| UNIX distributions, along with the emacs stuff. I was no longer at the
54| UofI, but Rob Kolstad, who was, asked me about it. I told him I didn't
55| care if they used it, and since then it has been on the BSD distributions.
56|
57| Somewhere along the way, several other unnamed people have had their
58| hands in it. It was converted to understand version 7 C. (The
59| original was version 6.) It was converted from its original filter
60| interface to its current "blow away the user's file" interface.
61| The $HOME/.indent.pro file parsing was added. Some more formatting
62| options were added.
63|
64| The source I have right now has two copyright notices. One is the
65| original from the UofI. One is from Berkeley.
66|
67| I am not a lawyer, and I certainly do not understand copyright law. As
68| far as I am concerned, the bulk of this program, everything covered by
69| the UofI copyright, is in the public domain, and worth every penny.
70| Berkeley's copyright probably should only cover their changes, and I
71| don't know their feelings about sending it out.
72
73In any case, there appears to be none at UofI to clarify/and change
74that copyright, but I am confident (based on the statements of its
75author) that the code, as it stands with its copyright, is
76distributable, and will not cause any legal problems.
77
78Hence, the issue reduces to *which* one to distribute through
79comp.sources.unix. I would suggest that with the permission of you
80folks (given that you have parts copyrighted), we distribute the 4.3
81version of indent, which appears to be the most up-to-date version. I
82happen to have just about every known version of indent, including the
83very original submission from the author to a unix tape, later the
84G-Emacs version, any 4.n version, sun version and the Unipress
85version. I still think we should not have to "go-back-in-time" and
86re-do all the work you people have done.
87
88I hope to hear from you as to what you think about this. You may of
89course send 4.3 version to the moderator directly, or you can let me
90know of your permission, and I will send the sources, or you can let
91me know that 4.3 version is off-limits, in which case we would probably
92have to revert to an older version. One way or another, I hope to get
93a version of indent to comp.sources.unix.
94
95regards.. oz
96
97cc: ccvaxa!willcox
98 sun.com!jar
99 uunet!rsalz
100
101