below.

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:09 AM, <cowan@ccil.org> wrote:

It might be possible to get the vanilla-from-AT&T System V Releases 1-3
freely licensed, though Novell is presumably still making money from AIX,
which descends from SVR3.

Hmm ..I thought all of the majors >>except<< for DEC bought out their licenses at some point. I admit I've forgotten the specifics, but that is my recollection.

SVR4 has proprietary Microsoft (Xenix) and
SunOS (Oracle) code in it, plus being the ancestor of still-current HP/UX.

HP/UX is an SVR3 & OSF/1 ancester. Solaris is SVR4. In fact it was the SVR4 license and deal between Sun and AT&T) that forced the whole OSF creation. One of the "principles" of the OSF was "Fair and Stable" license terms.

Which begs a question - since Solaris was SVR4 based and was made freely available via OpenSolaris et al, does that not make SVR4 open? I'm not a lawyer (nor play one on TV), but it does seem like that sets some sort of precedent.

Scrubbing proprietary third-party code to make an open-source release
of any of these ancient versions, as had to be done for Solaris (and Java),

Interesting - how did they "scrub" SVR4 from it? The whole idea was to take SVR4 and "enhance it" using the SVR4 API's.

is almost certainly too much work for anyone to want to undertake today.

Agreed, unless there is a clear statement from the owners, it's going to be hard; which is a shame from a historical stand point, but I agree.

lem