The historical files here represents copies of earlier versions of
Reduce and PSL with (at present) the oldes ones being from the early 1980s.
They are in general unaltered from the original archives that they were
recovered from, and a consequence of that is that some have restrictive
rights messages embedded which represented their status at that time.
Tony Hearn and Martin Griss as lead copyright holders were senty an enquiry:
> Would you grant permission for me to make these public as part of the
> above-mentioned web site (which Im expecting will eventually be
> formally accessioned into the Computer History Museum digital
> repository? Thanks very much.

Tony Hearn replied:
> Fine with me.

Martin Griss replied:
> I have no objections to their release with an appropriate note, but its
> important to know that several files were written or updated by
> multiple students at Utah and by several staff at HP Laboratories; many
> of these folks have most likely retired.
>
> So, I am not sure if we need to contact them for permission. Perhaps
> they at least need to be listed as contributors. As far as I can
> tell/recall, only some of the files have copyright notices that request
> my permission for release - I assume (or intended -:) these notice on
> the "main" files apply to all subsidiary files, both hand written and
> generated.
>
> We will need certainly to add some sort of caveat/disclosure that says
> these files are provided for historical interest only, and there is no
> implied warrantee of fitness or correctness for use, nor may they be
> used for any commercial pupose..

Please note that last paragraph that these files are made availanle to
record the historical trail of the Reduce project and the contributors -
both those named within the filea and others deserve thanks and credit.

For later copies of Reduce Tony Hearn arranged that contributors completed
paperwork to confirm that they were willing to have their code distributed
as part of Reduce. For PSL at some stage control and support was organised
through HP Labs, and a modest while after Reduce became an open source
project they confirmed that they were happy for their code to be included
as part of the open source version. It is probable that the rights that they
acquired in order to be able to develop and exploit PSL means that their
release of the code covers almost all of the versions here. See the HP
disclaimer in the PSL section of the main current version of the code.

The bibliography in the file doc/manual/bibl.bib lists many of those who
contributed to Reduce.

                                                          ACN April 2020

 
