9 Sep
2022
9 Sep
'22
6:17 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 08, 2022 at 08:05:44PM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
On Thu, 8 Sep 2022, Warner Losh wrote:
Why? Have you booted 32V? Run in it for a while? No VM, no networking,
very basic system. Other than historical, I don't understand the point.
On Thu, Sep 8, 2022 at 5:29 PM Steve Nickolas
<usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
I'm probably the only one brazen enough to put it to the test.
For some years, I've wanted to create a free implementation of System V, and
then move on from there. (I know there's limited utility for such a thing,
because of the BSDs.) On Thu, 8 Sep 2022, Warner Losh wrote:
It would be nice. At this late date, one wonders what would happen if it
were litigated again... I suspect that nobody would bother given the
small possible gain and the huge expense... But it would also reduce
shareholder values to explicitly say there's no copyright here or to
clarify that the ancient licenses are valid. So we're in this state where
it's basically free and clear, treated like it's free and clear, but
really isn't free and clear.
Warner But it likely didn't matter, since 32v likely
lost its copyright
protection due to AT&T distributing too many copies without the required
copyright markings. At least that was the preliminary ruling that caused
the suit to be settled... AT&T didn't want it finalized, though the cat
was somewhat out of the bag at this point...
It would be nice if that were an absolute rather than a probably, because
then the status for 32V wouldn't be clouded.
A few things actually hinge on this. If it were
considered a fact, and not
a mere opinion, that 32V was PD, then I could be sure that certain things
were safe to use, rather than having to rewrite (including some particularly
tricky stuff the BSDs never fully reimplemented, like diff(1)).
I'm a source management guy, I've written a couple of systems. I live and
breath diff and diff(1) is not in the slightest way hard. I wrote my own
version of SCCS in a way that you could get as many different versions of
the history as you wanted in one pass. That's a lot harder than diff(1).
But maybe I don't understand what you think is tricky about diff, you
may have some insight I'm missing, care to share?