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