2 Apr
2021
2 Apr
'21
5:16 p.m.
On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 10:17:51AM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is
meaningless if the code is
NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a
court of law). Sure, it's possible one could go for years or decades
without being sued, but with what I intended to do with the code, unless
there were an unclouded free/open license (anything from Toybox to MIT to
4BSD to LGPL to GPL3, I don't really care) it would legally be like painting
a bullseye on myself.
So I get that playing with v6 in an emulator is fun, it's a trip down memory
lane. What I don't get is why on God's Green Earth you would contemplate
building any sort of product on ancient Unix.
"It's out there" isn't good
enough. SunOS 4 is "out there" - nobody in
their right mind would integrate that into a freely available OS distro
because Oracle would come down on them like a megaton of bricks!
SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and
is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work
to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the
hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work).
So other than walking down memory lane, why would you want that code?