4 Mar
2017
4 Mar
'17
5:56 a.m.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one of TV or in a play or any such thing.
My position on this is the result of hanging around Groklaw during The SCO Group - Caldera
renamed
and repurposed - versus Linux and the World shenanigans; namely, it's valuable mostly
for historical
reasons or as some would have it, hysterical raisins. The actual "IP" -
intellectual property - has been
dispersed now for so many years through so many channels that the actual Unix source tree
copyrights
don't serve much of the original purpose of copyright any more. I'm sure we can
name any number of
reimplementations of the various stages of the Unix development - Minix 1.x and Coherent
for the V6-
7 interfaces, Schweitzer's Tunix for Unix SysVR3, the BSDs, Linux, etc for various
stages of BSD and
POSIX, and OpenSolaris for the latter stages of SysVR4 and so on.
And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think Novell was
much more than a
caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the last SysVR4 release of any consequence
was Solaris - has
Oracle done anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be the release of the
Unix SysV
source trees under a suitable open source license. (I've made a similar argument for
the IBM/MS OS/2,
DEC VAX VMS, and MS Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various other Internet
forums:
the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn door now. Better to
get the credit for
being friendly and open, and clear up some residual bugs while you're at it ... )
My 0.02c on this matter, and don't spend it all at once! :)
Wesley Parish
Quoting Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>:
I've been given two different interpretations so
I'm not sure who to
believe. I really would like to hear a lawyer from Oracle (ney Sun) for
Micro Focus (ney - At&t -> Novell) make a statement.
I believe the issue is that Sun was given something called "complete
rights", similar to what IBM had( which is how OSF was licensed - from
the
IBM one). This was interpreted to believe they could anything with it
with anything >>they<< did. That is to say, if they hacked on the
kernel
and published there kernel, then the parts that came from AT&T could be
also.
The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
use. I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the
specifics
please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking
in
it. Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the
streams
code. The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
about the AT&T version?
I have heard different legal folks say it was both still "closed" and
others say, it was now opened.
I don't know. I'm not willing or have I ever worked for anyone that has
believed it was now "free."
I do tend to think of 32V and before as generally open technology. I
come
to that between the UCB regents position, one hand, much less the
publishing of books like the Lions' book years ago. There have been
publications of how things like SVR3 and SVR4 >>worked<< but I don't
know
of source being included the same way the Lions text. If that were
done,
I would be more comfortable.
That said, I do feel like its time it >>should<< be made available; but
the
IP is I guess owned by Micro Focus.
Clem
On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
rights to
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
From:
Warner Losh
On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Random832
<random832(a)fastmail.com>
wrote:
>> My understanding is that System V source
of any sort is not legal
to
>> distribute.
> surely there are big chunks of the
opensolaris code that are not
*very
> much* changed from the original System V code
they're based on.
Under
> what theory, then, was Sun the copyright
holder and therefore able
to
> release it under the CDDL?
Their paid-up perpetual license that granted them
the right to do
that?
I wonder, if they do indeed have such a license, if they have the distribute original SysV source under the CDDL?
Or does that license
only
apply to SysV code that they have modified? And
if so, _how much_ does
it
have
to be modified, to qualify?
Maybe we can get them to distribute SysV under the CDDL... :-)
Noel