[TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM
Steve Nickolas
usotsuki at buric.co
Sat Apr 3 00:17:51 AEST 2021
On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote:
> On 2021 Apr 2, 04:26, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
>> Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>>
>>> There's still a cloud over Caldera's release, because the current license
>>> relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure
>>> the courts said they didn't).
>>
>> The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect,
>> it's too late anyway.
>
> The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded licence
> to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own the
> copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by a
> judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source.
This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could
to make it unambiguous what I meant.
A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is
NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a
court of law). Sure, it's possible one could go for years or decades
without being sued, but with what I intended to do with the code, unless
there were an unclouded free/open license (anything from Toybox to MIT to
4BSD to LGPL to GPL3, I don't really care) it would legally be like
painting a bullseye on myself.
I think this is why, although some of the BSDs did reintegrate the 32V and
V7 stuff, others stayed clear. There's enough of a cloud over the release
that it's still not really safe.
"It's out there" isn't good enough. SunOS 4 is "out there" - nobody in
their right mind would integrate that into a freely available OS distro
because Oracle would come down on them like a megaton of bricks!
-uso.
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