[TUHS] Bell Labs Holmdel site coming down

[Wesley Parish]

Several comments spring to mind:
One - closed-source proprietary software development is a minefield waiting 
for the unwary;
Two - open-source development is self-administering as far as "contributions" 
goes, and we generally don't need people to go through on a similar "find the 
haystack -in-the-needle" search;
Three - there is usually a group of people willing to do this sort of work - 
voluntarily - as the Groklaw example shows us, so it's often more an inertia 
thingee than anything more serious.

And last but hardly least, given the rise of the law-suit residual company, 
etc, opening the source of such orphaned systems may become a necessity, 
because law-suits such as the SCO example, will succeed if the law in general 
is kept ignorant of computer history, etc.  In that case, opening the OSF1 
source tree would pay dividends in peace of mind.

Just some thoughts.

Wesley Parish

On Thu, 18 May 2006 20:36, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> On Thu, May 18, 2006 2:42 am, Wesley Parish wrote:
> > I'm wondering if it wouldn't be possible to talk Novell into releasing
> > the Unix SysVr* source code under some form of BSD/MIT X license
> > following the coming evaporation of Societe Commerciel du Ondit - the
> > SCOGroup Rumourmonging Machine.
> >
> >
> > Then get OSF1-"lite" released following that.  Eating an elephant - one
> > bite at a time.
>
> I think the problem with all these `just open source it' schemes is that
> they're simpler in theory than in practice.  In particular, in practice
> someone has to go through the source of the system checking for everything
> that might have been licensed from someone else and whose license
> agreements might prohibit its release.  Few of those things will
> (probably) have been kept track of, and the penalty for failure is that
> some nasty residual company which now owns the stuff you licensed comes
> down your throat.
>
> For orphaned systems this is a lot of work for no obvious gain (it
> wouldn't be orphaned if the organization that created it thought it had
> much value to them).
>
> A good example would probably be SunOS 4 - we already know that Sun are
> quite interested in open sourcing stuff given OpenSolaris, but SunOS 4
> hasn't been, presumably because it is full of stuff-they-don't-own and has
> no commercial value at all.
>
> --tim
>
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