[TUHS] SunOS code?

[Warner Losh]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 1:41 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > 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
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