> and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.
Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS', and that
term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents (e.g. Sun
licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.
It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't need
Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?
The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne, was that SunOS wasn't just AT&T + BSD 4.2 + 4.3 + awesome hacking at SMI. There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there that could not be relicensed, even 28 years ago when things were fresh. Good luck getting those third party permissions now... Sun's paid-up Unix license they did for Solaris would cover any bits of AT&T code that was in there.
A quick grep of something that fell off an http server suggests that the number of these is quite limited. However, the files they are on have no other license, even though latter-day versions are available of hack, hunt, indent and pax are available (though to be fair, the latter two do give permission explicitly, and a good case can be made for hunt). I have no way of knowing, however, if there are other IP issues, not limited to unmarked sources, copyright notices that aren't 'well formed', code that's been hacked by third parties under a contract granting them copyright ownership and sun just a license, etc. It's that quagmire that efforts like this will run up against.
Warner