[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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