1This is the C indenter, it originally came from the University of Illinois
2via some distribution tape for PDP-11 Unix. It has subsequently been
3hacked upon by James Gosling @ CMU. It isn't very pretty, and really needs
4to be completely redone, but it is probably the nicest C pretty printer
5around.
6
7Further additions to provide "Kernel Normal Form" were contributed
8by the folks at Sun Microsystems.
9
10++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
11> From mnetor!yunexus!oz@uunet.UU.NET Wed Mar 9 15:30:55 1988
12> Date: Tue, 8 Mar 88 18:36:25 EST
13> From: yunexus!oz@uunet.UU.NET (Ozan Yigit)
14> To: bostic@okeeffe.berkeley.edu
15> Cc: ccvaxa!willcox@uunet.UU.NET, jag@sun.com, rsalz@uunet.UU.NET
16> In-Reply-To: Keith Bostic's message of Tue, 16 Feb 88 16:09:06 PST
17> Subject: Re: Indent...
18
19Thank you for your response about indent. I was wrong in my original
20observation (or mis-observation :-). UCB did keep the Illinois
21copyright intact.
22
23The issue still is whether we can distribute indent, and if we can, which
24version. David Willcox (the author) states that:
25
26| Several people have asked me on what basis I claim that indent is in
27| the public domain. I knew I would be sorry I made that posting.
28|
29| Some history. Way back in 1976, the project I worked on at the
30| University of Illinois Center for Advanced Computation had a huge
31| battle about how to format C code. After about a week of fighting, I
32| got disgusted and wrote a program, which I called indent, to reformat C
33| code. It had a bunch of different options that would let you format
34| the output the way you liked. In particular, all of the different
35| formats being championed were supported.
36|
37| It was my first big C program. It was ugly. It wasn't designed, it
38| just sort of grew. But it pretty much worked, and it stopped most of
39| the fighting.
40|
41| As a matter of form, I included a University of Illinois Copyright
42| notice. However, my understanding was that, since the work was done
43| on an ARPA contract, it was in the public domain.
44|
45| Time passed. Some years later, indent showed up on one of the early
46| emacs distributions.
47|
48| Later still, someone from UC Berlekey called the UofI and asked if
49| indent was in the public domain. They wanted to include it in their
50| UNIX distributions, along with the emacs stuff. I was no longer at the
51| UofI, but Rob Kolstad, who was, asked me about it. I told him I didn't
52| care if they used it, and since then it has been on the BSD distributions.
53|
54| Somewhere along the way, several other unnamed people have had their
55| hands in it. It was converted to understand version 7 C. (The
56| original was version 6.) It was converted from its original filter
57| interface to its current "blow away the user's file" interface.
58| The $HOME/.indent.pro file parsing was added. Some more formatting
59| options were added.
60|
61| The source I have right now has two copyright notices. One is the
62| original from the UofI. One is from Berkeley.
63|
64| I am not a lawyer, and I certainly do not understand copyright law. As
65| far as I am concerned, the bulk of this program, everything covered by
66| the UofI copyright, is in the public domain, and worth every penny.
67| Berkeley's copyright probably should only cover their changes, and I
68| don't know their feelings about sending it out.
69
70In any case, there appears to be noone at UofI to clarify/and change
71that copyright, but I am confident (based on the statements of its
72author) that the code, as it stands with its copyright, is
73distributable, and will not cause any legal problems.
74
75Hence, the issue reduces to *which* one to distribute through
76comp.sources.unix. I would suggest that with the permission of you
77folks (given that you have parts copyrighted), we distribute the 4.3
78version of indent, which appears to be the most up-to-date version. I
79happen to have just about every known version of indent, including the
80very original submission from the author to a unix tape, later the
81G-Emacs version, any 4.n version, sun version and the Unipress
82version. I still think we should not have to "go-back-in-time" and
83re-do all the work you people have done.
84
85I hope to hear from you as to what you think about this. You may of
86course send 4.3 version to the moderator directly, or you can let me
87know of your permission, and I will send the sources, or you can let
88me know that 4.3 version is off-limits, in which case we would probably
89have to revert to an older version. One way or another, I hope to get
90a version of indent to comp.sources.unix.
91
92regards.. oz
93
94cc: ccvaxa!willcox
95 sun.com!jar
96 uunet!rsalz
97
98