[TUHS] Open sourcing SunOS?

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 1:12 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 01:04:37PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 22, 2023, 8:50 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Has anyone tried talking to anyone at Oracle about possibly getting
> > > the SunOS code released under an open source license? There can't be
> > > any commercial value left in it.
> > >
> >
> > SunOS 4 has a lot of encumbered code in it, especially for i386 drivers.
>
> There is SunOS as in everything shipped, kernel and userspace, and there
> is the kernel.  So far as I remember, the i386 stuff was never integrated
> into the source tree that Sun shipped from.  There was the roadrunner
> stuff but I don't think that ever made it in to the official tree.  If
> it did, nobody paid attention to it.  All people cared about at the
> time as SPARC and I don't think there was any outsourced hacking for
> SPARC, that was all in house.
>

I know there's i386 source kits for the Roadrunner, and that's really the
only thing that SunOS ever supported, at least that was sold. I'd been told
that it had been poorly integrated by people that had worked on it here in
Boulder, so I believe that.

In the 4.1.3 sources there's a number of i386 ifdefs, and at least a math
library
for i386. But no kernel bits, except for a bunch of ifdefs for i386 that
I've not
looked at closely. Maybe this is what is meant by 'poorly integrated' :)


> The networking stack in SunOS 4.x was BSD derived.  You might be thinking
> of Solaris, that took the Lachman STREAMS stack but that was 5.x, not
> 4.x.
>

I was thinking of the streams stuff that's in 4.x BSD. There's AT&T
copyrights
on it. There's also, strangely, rfs sources included with some of the stuff
one
can find online. But it looks to be imported nearly verbatim from System V
of some flavor with very few edits, judging by the 1.1 versions in many of
the
files.


> As the only guy, that I'm aware of, who took all the encumbered stuff
> out of the kernel, put back the BSD tty drivers and a few other small
> things that resulted in a kernel that we could freely open source,
> I beg to differ with:
>
> > Bits of the
> > network stack as well. It was hopeless to try to open source. There was a
> > lot of bits
> > and pieces that Sun had done with contracts that were, at best, ambiguous
> > for
> > what to do should they want to open source it.
>

I'm just reporting what my VP told me...  Grepping through the source I can
find online, the evidence is closer to what you say than what Glen told me.
Either he or I must have confused Solaris 2 with SunOS 4.

Warner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20230222/c7cee715/attachment.htm>