On 2/9/24 00:49, Warner Losh wrote:
Trade Secret is one of the big reasons there was a preliminary ruling
in the UCB/ATT lawsuit that 32V had lost its copyright protection. It
had been distributed outside of AT&T to a large degree without the
Trade Secret warning. It's why all the 4BSD releases are publicly
available now.
Absolutely true, but there was a bit more work needed than just the
preliminary ruling. In parallel, the TUHS folk were petitioning old SCO
(not TSG) to release the ancient Unixes under a BSD-style license:
https://www.tuhs.org/PUPS/petition.html. Eventually old SCO agreed to a
BSD-style hobbyist license which cost US$100:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010603053221/http://www.sco.com/offers/ancien….
Some details of the process are here:
https://www.tuhs.org/PUPS/pstatus.html.
Then a while later, Caldera (who had bought the Unix licensing from old
SCO) offered their $0 license:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf.
I want to give a shout out to Dion Johnson who was the driving force at
old SCO that finally got them to agree to putting the ancient Unixes
under a BSD-style license.
Cheers, Warren