11 Nov
2003
11 Nov
'03
6:15 p.m.
* Wesley Parish wrote:
I've personally thought that Sun should release
the source trees of its old
BSD-based SunOS with the idea of getting back onside with all the Linux and
Unix people it pissed off by its "buying" a "Unix" license from SCO,
the
Societe Commercial du On-Dit, the Commercial Society of Rumourmongers.
I suspect that releasing source to virtually any substantial, recent
commercial Unix is a hideous political nightmare. They almost
certainly have code that came from many other companies, under lots of
different license agreements, none of which were designed to allow for
open source distribution, and every one of which has to be looked at
very carefully in case someone pops up and sues. And all the code
will have been mangled together in all sorts of exciting ways.
I remember that getting BSD 4.x released was a huge saga, and SunOS4
is bound to be much worse politically.
I was also thinking - there's enough free MC68K
emulation stuff out there -
for Mac, Amiga, Atari, etc - that writing a Sun3 emulator should be
relatively easy.
Surely small Sun3s should be easy to come by? They were until
recently, anyway.
--tim