mailx for 3b1 ver 3.0

Isaac Rabinovitch isaac at gethen.UUCP
Mon Jun 27 08:06:37 AEST 1988


I used mailx briefly and two things became apparent:

(1) It's a S5 adaptation of the BSD program "Mail" (the capital M
distinguishes it from the dumb mail, which it uses to actually post
messages).

(2) Whoever did that adaptation was a twit.  Didn't keep things
consistent, making it easy to accidentaly skip messages.

But this gives me an idea, which you should probably think about before
you do anything with it.  When you buy Unix PC Unix, you're buying a
binary license for both S5 and BSD.  It seems to me (he says, as the ice
groans under his weight)  that if someone with legal accces to the
Berkeley source code were to port Mail to the Unix PC, there'd be
nothing wrong with him giving an executable (but not source) copy to
anybody who already had a legitimate copy of Unix PC Unix.  And the port
would be damn easy -- many years back I did it to the the Onyx C8000,
and I was a bad C programmer working with a putrid C compiler.  Whoever
wrote the original program had obviously just got out of a structured
programming class!



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