[TUHS] Re: Open sourcing SunOS?

On 2/22/23 12:04 PM, Warner Losh wrote: SunOS had a complicated set of license encumbrances. I can't claim to have fully understood them even at the time. In the mid-1980s, the notion of "open sourcing" as we understand it today wasn't a goal or even considered and so never entered into the terms of the technologies Sun used. These might have been overcome with effort but in the context of the time it didn't seem important. Things Sun licensed widely, like source kits for NFS/VFS, were things we routinely and repeatedly sanitized as they evolved. As part of the SPARC partners program SunOS was licensed to people building SPARC-based products but as Warner notes in the Solbourne experience, especially early on, there wasn't a "product" so much as a "process" that disseminated it. It would be more correct to say that Sun was willing to donate the VM system back to Berkeley, but my recollection is that CSRG planned to get to that functionality through a different implementation path and didn't want it. We expected "everyone" to eventually get the VM system, as it was in SVR4 before SunOS 4.0 even shipped, and so "everyone" (even the people who otherwise offered BSD systems) would have access to it, just like we did. (Of course that notion of "everyone" is pretty limited but at the time it was just The Way It Was.) We did donate all the shared library work to Berkeley, probably the closest to what we'd now call "open source" that Sun did in that era. At the time, Berkeley didn't plan on migrating off of the a.out object file format and so it was useful to them to have the a.out-based implementation. While I am confident he would have supported it, I doubt Scott ever knew about the donations and discussions. The organization-chart-local VP signed off on it and I had a 10 minute phone conversation (no part of which involved balance sheets or stock values) with the lawyer who wrote the letter of transmittal that accompanied the code.