Re: [TUHS] Bell Labs Holmdel site coming down

On Thu, May 18, 2006 2:42 am, Wesley Parish wrote: I think the problem with all these `just open source it' schemes is that they're simpler in theory than in practice. In particular, in practice someone has to go through the source of the system checking for everything that might have been licensed from someone else and whose license agreements might prohibit its release. Few of those things will (probably) have been kept track of, and the penalty for failure is that some nasty residual company which now owns the stuff you licensed comes down your throat. For orphaned systems this is a lot of work for no obvious gain (it wouldn't be orphaned if the organization that created it thought it had much value to them). A good example would probably be SunOS 4 - we already know that Sun are quite interested in open sourcing stuff given OpenSolaris, but SunOS 4 hasn't been, presumably because it is full of stuff-they-don't-own and has no commercial value at all. --tim