[TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 10:17:51AM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> 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.

So I get that playing with v6 in an emulator is fun, it's a trip down memory
lane.  What I don't get is why on God's Green Earth you would contemplate
building any sort of product on ancient Unix.

> "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!

SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and
is basically under one big lock for SMP.  It was a huge amount of work
to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the
hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work).

So other than walking down memory lane, why would you want that code?