Below

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote:

On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:

My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
distribute. I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.

Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)

Not a lawyer and don't play one TV or anywhere else....

Some thoughts...

1.) UCB Regents Position per AT&T/BSDi/UCB - anything through 32V is public domain (see groklaw)

2.) All of Sun & IBM, bought out source licenses from AT&T with rights to do anything.... IBM is based on the SVR3 license, Sun on SVR4

3.) IBM's license is the basis for the OSF/1 license

4.) HP independently eventually gets is own bought out license, but I'm not sure what it's based [need to google the old UNIGRAM/X or the like]

5.) Sun takes SVR4 in and starts to add "Solaris features" to it (not going to argue percentages here for the moment).

6.) Sun open sources this code base...

Now some questions....

From the above, one could argue that set of code included in Solaris from the SysV linage was made public by step 6.

I have seen argument that anything through SVR3 is public because of the actions of IBM, HP, and SUN when the code was bought out; but I have not seen a definitive action like step 6 that infer all of SVR3 was public.