[TUHS] Re: Is OpenText Corporation the Current System V Copyright Holder?

[segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org>]

On Thursday, March 14th, 2024 at 8:50 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

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> At the time, though I have no reference for it, Sun bought a paid-up license from AT&T and part of that purchase included the right to distribute the source code in the way they did. This was a special deal Sun cut with AT&T.
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> ...
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> I also found:
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> > So how is it Sun is permitted to open source Unix outright while IBM is sued for more than US$5 billion in damages? Sun is mum on particulars, but it has said it licensed additional rights in a 2003 deal in which it paid SCO US$9.3 million.
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> at https://www.zdnet.com/article/sun-poised-to-take-open-source-solaris-step/ dated in 2005.
>

That makes sense given the collaborative efforts between USL and Sun on SVR4 actually.

On Thursday, March 14th, 2024 at 8:50 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:

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> The main problem with any of this is that all the companies that took System V made changes to customize it for their hardware.
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> ...
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> Though much of the later work was done by third parties and consortia, so even if AT&T successor in interest gave the nod, those other parties might not have granted AT&T the right to do this.
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> Warner

That's a good point, like many long-standing codebases, System V code is littered with little "this is copyright this subcontractor, this is copyright that contributor, etc." and big thorough license descriptions sitting at the top of source files weren't in vogue at the time so it offers confusion over ownership with little paths to clarity.  Maybe a happy middle ground would be a 4.4BSD-Lite-ish approach to System V in which anything demonstrated to be exact program text that is not out in the open in the form of Research or illumos code can be scrubbed from, say, SVR4, and that fragmentary codebase could then fly under the research license or CDDL or what have you.

As you mention though, what company wants to devote their resources to a revenue-less project like that?  It'd be swell if some sort of publicly funded organization like the Library of Congress, Smithsonian Institution, or equivalents in other locales could take up that mantle on this and other software preservation efforts.  That's something I think about often in my retro video game disassembly work, it'd be nice to preserve these historically significant applications and systems as a formal career rather than just hobby stuff.  But right, where's the revenue stream to convince anyone to do that, especially the legal hurdles involved?  Lawyers ain't cheap...

- Matt G.