2 Apr
2021
2 Apr
'21
4:17 p.m.
On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote:
On 2021 Apr 2, 04:26, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could
to make it unambiguous what I meant.
A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is
NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a
court of law). Sure, it's possible one could go for years or decades
without being sued, but with what I intended to do with the code, unless
there were an unclouded free/open license (anything from Toybox to MIT to
4BSD to LGPL to GPL3, I don't really care) it would legally be like
painting a bullseye on myself.
I think this is why, although some of the BSDs did reintegrate the 32V and
V7 stuff, others stayed clear. There's enough of a cloud over the release
that it's still not really safe.
"It's out there" isn't good enough. SunOS 4 is "out there"
- nobody in
their right mind would integrate that into a freely available OS distro
because Oracle would come down on them like a megaton of bricks!
-uso.
Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded licence
to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own the
copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by a
judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source. There's still a cloud over Caldera's
release, because the current license
relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure
the courts said they didn't).
The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect,
it's too late anyway.