[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Doug McIlroy]

> [a] case where AT&T attempted to see whether its Unix code had been stolen

> Coherent?

I doubt it. The only access to Coherent that I am aware of was Dennis's
site visit (recounted in Wikipedia, no less). Steve's Yacc adventure 
probably concerned another company.

Besides the affairs of Coherent and Yacc, there was a guy in
Massachusetts who sold Unix-tool lookalikes; I don't remember his name.
We were suspicious and checked his binaries against our source--bingo!

At the same time, our patent lawyer happened to be negotiating
cross-licenses with DEC. DEC had engaged the very plagiarist as
an expert to support their claim that AT&T's pile of patents didn't
measure up to theirs. After a day of bargaining, our lawyer somehow
managed to bring casual conversation around to the topic of stolen
code and eventually offered the suspect a peek at a real example.
He readily agreed that the disassembled binary on the one hand must
have been compiled from the source code on the other. In a Perry
Mason moment, the lawyer pounced: "Would it surprise you if I told
you that this is ours and that is yours?"

The discredited expert didn't appear at next day's meeting.
The lawyer returned to Murray Hill aglow about his coup. 
The product soon disappeared from the market.

Doug

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Ron Natalie]

> Personally, so long as it wasn't garbage code, I've always been sort of
stoked to stumble across my code in strange places.  It's fun to think that
people found it useful.

It wasn't one of my  UNIX things, but I had written our own standalone
PDP-11 router system (we originally used MIT's C-Gateway but Noel got exiled
for a while and it kind of languished so I wrote my own).   About a year or
two after I wrote it I got a call from NASA:

ME:   Hello.
NASA:   We brought a VAX up on our network and now the gateway is printing
errors.
ME:   OK, what sort of error.
NASA:   Well... we're not sure exactly.
ME:  (thinking about my error messages) Did it just print out some register
in octal or something?
NASA:   It was from the interlan driver.
ME:   (now wondering why they're being real cagey about things) What does it
say exactly?
NASA:   It was something about trailers.
ME:   (thinking)...Oh, is it "TRAILERS MAKE ME BARF?"
NASA:   Yes, that was it.

This was back before BSD used the ARP protocol numbers to negotiate if the
other machine wanted to use trailers.   It just always did them or not based
on an ifconfig option.     While trailers were a great idea for the paging
structure of the VAX they were a bad idea for my code (which wanted to find
the IP header at a fixed place not the beginning of the payload data).

 

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 10:13:31AM -0500, Ron Natalie wrote:
> For most of the time in my UNIX career, I was working either for the
> University or the US Army, so I never had any claim on my code.    It went
> out on various distributions, and I didn't think much about it.   Every once
> and a while I'd be surprised when I came across my code in some deployed
> system (of all things the NeXT box, for example).

Personally, so long as it wasn't garbage code, I've always been sort of
stoked to stumble across my code in strange places.  It's fun to think
that people found it useful.

There was a period of time, not sure if it is true now or not, that my
rewrite of dd(1) was in use at all the disk drive companies.  It has
a lot of tweaks in it for benchmarking, it can do random iops, report
bandwidth or latency, write a known pattern, verify the pattern, etc.
Nothing earth shattering but useful enough that when I talked to people
working on drives they'd mention it when we were talking about performance
stuff.  Neat.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Ron Natalie]

Speaking of looking for "stolen" code.    It can be daunting.   For many
years my company was in a love-hate relationship with one of our
competitors.   We started out selling their product.   We then parted
company and wrote our own.   Then we went into joint development for a
couple of years.   We then parted company again.   Then we went to purchase
them.    They sent me up to do due diligence on the company during the
acquisition.   It was feared that they had taken code from another
competitor and they wanted me to verify that.    Didn't find any evidence of
that, though I did find some verbatim code of mine that they weren't
supposed to have, that was rendered moot by the fact that we were once again
going to be the same company.

For most of the time in my UNIX career, I was working either for the
University or the US Army, so I never had any claim on my code.    It went
out on various distributions, and I didn't think much about it.   Every once
and a while I'd be surprised when I came across my code in some deployed
system (of all things the NeXT box, for example).

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Ron Natalie]

I believe we have the originator of that quote on this list.  Steve?

-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Dave Horsfall

On Mon, 6 Mar 2017, Ron Natalie wrote:

> They used it for TSO (suitable for kicking dead whales down the beach) ...

Now there's an expression I haven't seen for many years.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, Mar 7, 2017 at 1:52 AM, Angelo Papenhoff <aap at papnet.eu> wrote:

> Had they really replaced (almost?)
> ​ ​
> all code by the time of AIX 4?
>
​I'm not saying it is not possible as it there was certainly precedent at
other places.​  As I said, DG did a ground up rewrite for their new kernel
at one point.   DEC and HP switched to OSF/1 (aka CMU Mach).    And I also
know that the AIX base was originally considered for OSF/1 but was rejected
in favor of OSF/1.

I also have not knowledge of a ground up rewrite and I did work with a
number of IBM guys for a long time and my firm did a lot work for IBM.  I
really think if they had completely rewritten it, in the manner of DG and
say Stratus; then there would have been much more notice in the community
at large.

Part of why I am a little suspect is why would they have invested in a
rewrite if they already had something that worked for their systems (which
they did) -i.e. the business reason behind it and remember IBM was very
much driven by their businesses.  Stratus needed fault tolerance, so a new
kernel was a requirement for them.  DG, DEC were all trying to play catch
up with Sun and were trying to use their new kernels as way to do so
quickly.

Thus, I suspect this is an area where large sections of the AIX kernel were
replaced, similar to the way BSD evolved, but can not say for sure.  You
would need some of the folks from Austin to chime in.  I did check with
some from folks from IBM and LCC at the time and validated as one of them
said to me "your memory, is pretty much the same as mine."

BTW: even if they did do a whole kernel swap at between version X and Y -
that would beg the questions of incompatibility.   They would have had the
earlier AT&T/BSD code/semantics - and would have had to specifically break
it (as BSD 4.2 did in couple of cases).   While possible, again, I do have
memories of my brothers and sisters at LCC working on the IBM projects with
a load of compatibility tests (many which we had written for them).
 That's not to say, there were not times when the IBM folks interpreted
things differently.  I do have memories explaining PDP/Minicomputer-isms to
the more mainframe thinking folks.  But

Clem
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Angelo Papenhoff]

On 06/03/17, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 11:20 AM, Joerg Schilling <schily at schily.net> wrote:
> 
> >
> > The kernel definitely looks like it was written from scratch.
> >
> > The fact that there are functions like "issig()" make it obvious that the
> > authors did have access to at least the V6 kernel via the Lions book.
> 
> 
> I can say for a fact that is not how it was.   AIX was a port starting
> with AT&T code originally targeted to run on DEC and Intel Systems.
> 
> As I said previously when I ran down the history of AIX, the developers had
> AT&T licenses.   As I was reminded in an off line discussion with one of
> the IBM guys when I was checking to make sure, ISC did the original 386
> port for all of AT&T, Intel and IBM (one port - 3 checks).  ISC also
> started the AIX port, with a number of the folks moving to LCC which was a
> step I left out in my previous email sorry, since it was implied when I
> said they started with that AT&T 386 stuff (which AT&T got from ISC).
> Bottom line.... it was not a rewrite, it was always a port.
> 
> ...
> 
> Companies like DEC, HP and IBM start working with one version of the kernel
> or worse yet, the command system and enhance it as they need.   But time
> moves forward and their version and the rest of the world start to become
> different (branch/fork).   Linux has been mostly able to keep the kernel
> the same, but not the command system.

I find this hard to believe. Of course code evolves, but I don't really
see anything that looks like original UNIX code in AIX 4.1.3. I would
expect at least a slight semblance. Had they really replaced (almost?)
all code by the time of AIX 4?

aap

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 5:59 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> But at that time, LCC was putting things in AIX, Ultrix, Tru64, HP/UX,
> DG/UX, Prime-ux, Intel, AT&T and a host of others.  It was kinda
> neat setting everyone's dirty laundry though.. you learned a lot.

​I left out Solaris and SunOS too.

And BTW: Being lucky enough to have hacked on the kernel of almost all of
the majors at one time or another, I've been asked an interesting
question.  Which was the best to work on.. they were all different is the
best answer, I give.

But the fact is that DG was a source licensee but they did a full kernel
rewrite starting I want to say in the late 1980s, early 1990's to build a
scalable SMP.  It was probably the easiest of all the kernels I ever got to
hack on.   Very clean, well documented and the locks were easy to
understand.​ We did a study for DG to TNC into it, be they never pulled the
trigger.  We quoted it faster than any other port, because our experience
had been that everything we had done on DG/UX had gone so smoothly.   But
we'll never know.  They died shortly after the study was finished, which
was a shame.   I've sometimes wonder what happened to that IP.

It would be interesting to compare it to OSF/1, which was probably the
other very cool kernel I hacked on extensively for both Intel and later DEC
of course.  DG/UX was not quite as modern as Mach from a standpoint of
things likes "ports" or being a uKernel - but as a pure well documented and
easy to understand SMP UNIX kernel it was hard to beat.

I did do a little work with Chorus and still have the doc set, but never
worked with  enough to have an opinion of how good it was.   It showed
promise and I know the UI/AT&T guys had hoped to go there at some point.

Larry's described Solarius pretty well and my experience match his, but I
always thought that the locks were madness IMO - so easy to get wrong.
SunOS was a lot simpler and as Larry has said was pretty elegant for what
was there.

HP/UX was pretty darn bullet proof.  The HP folks worked on fault tolerance
got rid of panics more than other other UNIX we say, which was pretty
amazing, but it was not the easiest kernel to mess with.    We did manage
to splice the vproc layer and TNC in it and we had a lot of fun with
process migration.  Its too bad that never shipped.  Again, I've wonder
about that IP too.

Clem
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warren Toomey]

> Steve Johnson wrote:
> >I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see whether
> >its Unix code had been stolen.
 
On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 03:32:41PM -0800, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> Coherent?

Dennis told a story about doing this with Coherent:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.coherent/syYwL-GZ15U

	Warren
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Random832]

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On Mon, Mar 6, 2017, at 18:31, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see whether
> its Unix code had been stolen.  A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
> attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had been
> copied before bringing out the big legal guns.   I was one of
> several people asked to log into the system and see what I could
> figure out.  They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc,
> because they assumed that would be hard to duplicate.
> 
> So I spent an interesting hour checking it out.   The first thing I
> did was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised
> features were in the program, and they weren't.   Then I threw a
> couple of difficult cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their
> code.  And besides, it was VERY slow.  So I concluded it was a
> reimplementation.   I gather that was the consensus of others as
> well, and AT&T backed off.

Sounds a lot like Dennis Ritchie's Coherent story:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

Yeah, the wikipedia page talks about Dennis.  And the source is here:

http://www.nesssoftware.com/home/mwc/source.php

On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 03:48:46PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> I'll bet anything this was Coherent, I remember the same story, I think
> Dennis was involved as well.
> 
> On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 03:44:32PM -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
> > I don't remember.???? In fact, I'm not sure I ever knew...
> > 
> > Steve
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Cory Smelosky" <b4 at gewt.net>
> > To:
> > Cc:"TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
> > Sent:Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:32:41 -0800
> > Subject:Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?
> > 
> >  Steve Johnson wrote:
> >  > I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see
> > whether
> >  > its Unix code had been stolen. A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
> >  > attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had
> > been
> >  > copied before bringing out the big legal guns. I was one of several
> >  > people asked to log into the system and see what I could figure
> > out.
> >  > They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc, because they
> > assumed
> >  > that would be hard to duplicate.
> >  >
> >  > So I spent an interesting hour checking it out. The first thing I
> > did
> >  > was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised features
> > were
> >  > in the program, and they weren't. Then I threw a couple of
> > difficult
> >  > cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their code. And besides,
> > it
> >  > was VERY slow. So I concluded it was a reimplementation. I gather
> >  > that was the consensus of others as well, and AT&T backed off.
> >  >
> >  > Steve
> >  >
> >  >
> > 
> >  Coherent?
> > 
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

I'll bet anything this was Coherent, I remember the same story, I think
Dennis was involved as well.

On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 03:44:32PM -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I don't remember.???? In fact, I'm not sure I ever knew...
> 
> Steve
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Cory Smelosky" <b4 at gewt.net>
> To:
> Cc:"TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
> Sent:Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:32:41 -0800
> Subject:Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?
> 
>  Steve Johnson wrote:
>  > I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see
> whether
>  > its Unix code had been stolen. A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
>  > attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had
> been
>  > copied before bringing out the big legal guns. I was one of several
>  > people asked to log into the system and see what I could figure
> out.
>  > They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc, because they
> assumed
>  > that would be hard to duplicate.
>  >
>  > So I spent an interesting hour checking it out. The first thing I
> did
>  > was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised features
> were
>  > in the program, and they weren't. Then I threw a couple of
> difficult
>  > cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their code. And besides,
> it
>  > was VERY slow. So I concluded it was a reimplementation. I gather
>  > that was the consensus of others as well, and AT&T backed off.
>  >
>  > Steve
>  >
>  >
> 
>  Coherent?
> 

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Steve Johnson]

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I don't remember.   In fact, I'm not sure I ever knew...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: "Cory Smelosky" <b4@gewt.net>
To:
Cc:"TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:32:41 -0800
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?

 Steve Johnson wrote:
 > I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see
whether
 > its Unix code had been stolen. A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
 > attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had
been
 > copied before bringing out the big legal guns. I was one of several
 > people asked to log into the system and see what I could figure
out.
 > They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc, because they
assumed
 > that would be hard to duplicate.
 >
 > So I spent an interesting hour checking it out. The first thing I
did
 > was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised features
were
 > in the program, and they weren't. Then I threw a couple of
difficult
 > cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their code. And besides,
it
 > was VERY slow. So I concluded it was a reimplementation. I gather
 > that was the consensus of others as well, and AT&T backed off.
 >
 > Steve
 >
 >

 Coherent?

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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Cory Smelosky]

Steve Johnson wrote:
> I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see whether
> its Unix code had been stolen.  A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
> attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had been
> copied before bringing out the big legal guns.   I was one of several
> people asked to log into the system and see what I could figure out.
> They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc, because they assumed
> that would be hard to duplicate.
>
> So I spent an interesting hour checking it out.   The first thing I did
> was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised features were
> in the program, and they weren't.   Then I threw a couple of difficult
> cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their code.  And besides, it
> was VERY slow.  So I concluded it was a reimplementation.   I gather
> that was the consensus of others as well, and AT&T backed off.
>
> Steve
>
>

Coherent?

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Steve Johnson]

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I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see whether
its Unix code had been stolen.  A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had been
copied before bringing out the big legal guns.   I was one of
several people asked to log into the system and see what I could
figure out.  They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc,
because they assumed that would be hard to duplicate.

So I spent an interesting hour checking it out.   The first thing I
did was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised
features were in the program, and they weren't.   Then I threw a
couple of difficult cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their
code.  And besides, it was VERY slow.  So I concluded it was a
reimplementation.   I gather that was the consensus of others as
well, and AT&T backed off.

Steve


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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 5:29 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Clem, this reminds me: AIX on the mainframes and RS/6000 were different,
> weren't they? I only worked with the RS/6000 one.
>

​Yes - they diverged at one point and the System/38 guys diverged again.
Picking things up from both lines -- I was telling the story some what
amusing story the other nigh about. the legal time team in Rochester, MN
being quite different than NY.

One thing you learn after having IBM has a customer, is that they were N
different companies, and each had their own cultures.  It could be quite
trying for a small firm like LCC.   Our external legal counsel once said,
"for such a small firm, you guys have really interesting legal issues."

But at that time, LCC was putting things in AIX, Ultrix, Tru64, HP/UX,
DG/UX, Prime-ux, Intel, AT&T and a host of others.  It was kinda
neat setting everyone's dirty laundry though.. you learned a lot.

Clem
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 11:20 AM, Joerg Schilling <schily at schily.net> wrote:

>
> The kernel definitely looks like it was written from scratch.
>
> The fact that there are functions like "issig()" make it obvious that the
> authors did have access to at least the V6 kernel via the Lions book.


​I can say for a fact that is not how it was.   AIX was a port starting
with AT&T code originally targeted to run on DEC and Intel Systems.

As I said previously when I ran down the history of AIX, the developers had
AT&T licenses.   As I was reminded in an off line discussion with one of
the IBM guys when I was checking to make sure, ISC did the original 386
port for all of AT&T, Intel and IBM (one port - 3 checks).  ISC also
started the AIX port, with a number of the folks moving to LCC which was a
step I left out in my previous email sorry, since it was implied when I
said they started with that AT&T 386 stuff (which AT&T got from ISC).
Bottom line.... it was not a rewrite, it was always a port.

One of the issues that I think many people from the outside looking in, do
not fully understand is that many firms struggled with was how difficult it
was/is to keep things current (BTW:  Linux struggles with today just as
much as UNIX ever did - just less marketing $s being spend - it is  very
hard problem).

Companies like DEC, HP and IBM start working with one version of the kernel
or worse yet, the command system and enhance it as they need.   But time
moves forward and their version and the rest of the world start to become
different (branch/fork).   Linux has been mostly able to keep the kernel
the same, but not the command system.

Anyway, the question is how do keep your "branch" current.   Not only do
you have to compete with other "vendors" -- you also have we now call the
FOSS community creating and enhancing the tools, so you want to pick up
those new tools and or some if not all of the enhancements to those you
already have.  Plus those enhancement are likely to conflict with you own.
  Its a struggle and the bigger the firm, it seems like the harder time
they have doing it.

General you start with one, and just keep folding in.   Rarely do you swap
out.   Both DEC and HP used OSF/1 as time to swap out the command system.
DEC swapped out the entire kernel, HP did not.  Interestingly enough, IBM,
who's license OSF was using, IIRC did not use either part from OSF in it;s
entirety, but instead took things back piece by piece.

Anyway, I think AIX as a whole was an example of that.   I'd have to check
with some of my old LCC coworkers about what versions of the command system
was used to start with for AIX. I never directly worked on that project so
I'm personally not sure.   My guess it would have been PWB III time frame
was the SCCS starts, with a lot of BSD injected because of the University
focus, whatever was kicking around Yorktown, plus whatever ISC had, plus
whatever LCC/UCLA had - oh yeah and originally it had to run both on 386s
and 360s, so the code user space had some stuff in that was "different"
from what you saw on Vaxen.

IBM Marketing (just like DEC and HP marketing) technically decided what was
in or out, not the techies (although at DEC we were probably a little more
devious).  But at DEC not matter what was in the code - the "SPD" was the
final statement - and that was own by Marketing.  I'm pretty sure AIX
worked similarly.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[ron minnich]

Clem, this reminds me: AIX on the mainframes and RS/6000 were different,
weren't they? I only worked with the RS/6000 one.

I suspect the Palo Alto people I talked to were getting stonewalled by the
mainframe guys when it came to native channel programming. The mainframe VM
folks probably thought of native AIX as an existential threat.

Much as, ca. 2005, the Power hypervisor guys viewed native Linux as a
threat -- they were certainly right in this case, many of us in the DOE
labs wanted to get that hypervisor out of our lives. We spent some time at
LANL trying to get native Linux from IBM but it was just a little too soon
I guess. Funny how history repeats.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warren Toomey]

> On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 05:36:13AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> > Eric Raymond wrote a comparison tool. So did I:
> > http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/Ctcompare/index.html
 
On Mon, Mar 06, 2017 at 12:17:44PM -0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> So have you ever run that on, say, any of the BSDs claimed to be free
> of AT&T code, vs 32v or V7 or some other pre-dating-free version and
> summarized all the files/routines that were identical?

[ I answered Larry by private mail too early this morning, and interpreted
  his question incorrectly. I'm awake now. ]

There was slightly more 32V code in Net/2 that the UCB folk had found,
but this was still negligible and could easily have been rewritten.
The list of results is at:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/Ctcompare/Ctf/32Vkern_vs_Net2kern.txt

	Warren
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2017, Ron Natalie wrote:

> They used it for TSO (suitable for kicking dead whales down the beach) ...

Now there's an expression I haven't seen for many years.

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[ron minnich]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 11:06 AM Paul Ruizendaal <pnr at planet.nl> wrote:

>
> My recollection of reading Groklaw way back when is that TSG had hired "a
> team of MIT deep divers" to do source code analysis, but I don't recall
> their methodology ever being disclosed.
>

yeah, they only got so far and then got hired away to go look in hawaii for
some birth certificate.

 Or, maybe, they never existed.

ron
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 05:36:13AM +1000, Warren Toomey wrote:
> Eric Raymond wrote a comparison tool. So did I:
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/Ctcompare/index.html

So have you ever run that on, say, any of the BSDs claimed to be free
of AT&T code, vs 32v or V7 or some other pre-dating-free version and
summarized all the files/routines that were identical?

I guess it's a (very) dead horse but it would show that AT&T had a 
copyright case.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warren Toomey]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 12:19:09AM +0800, Jason Stevens wrote:
>    I remember back in the original SCO vs the world days when SGi
>    apparently dumped some 32v and was quickly dumped from Linux, there was
>    some source auditing tool that they used? All I remember is that it
>    used the term 'shards' which of course is popular with the DB kids so
>    it's hard to find... Now that there is an insane dump it'd be
>    interesting to compare actual ancestry vs what we've always been
>    told...

Eric Raymond wrote a comparison tool. So did I:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/Programs/Ctcompare/index.html

That's what I use to build the similarity lists on the Unix Tree.

Cheers, Warren
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Nemo]

On 6 March 2017 at 13:00, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 8:21 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I once heard that some version of AIX was actually implemented in PL/I. I
>> strongly doubted that, and no one's mentioned it so I assume that's
>> apocryphal? It would be so distinctive that I can't imagine someone NOT
>> mentioning it if it were the case.
>
> I spent about 6 years working with IBM and U. Penn on AIX and nothing of
> that was ever mentioned by anyone. It sounds like a myth.

Also, they would have used PL/S or PLMP or somesuch
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PL/S #6-).  Interesting, over the
years, IBM has used numerous languages for their various OS systems
(http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=226253 that, granted, has no UNIX
in it).

N.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Paul Ruizendaal]

My recollection of reading Groklaw way back when is that TSG had hired "a team of MIT deep divers" to do source code analysis, but I don't recall their methodology ever being disclosed.

I do recall some sort of sharding tool being proposed by the Linux' defenders (Eric Raymond?). From memory, the idea was to first parse the source into a normalized form to abstract away white space and variable naming. Then the tool would shard each normalized file into slices of 3 lines and compute a SHA[?] hash for each slice. Finally it would identify hash clashes and figure out if there were ranges of lines with clashing hashes. Human inspection could then identify whether the original lines involved looked like a case of copied source code. I do not recall that this tool was ever used or even built.



On 6 Mar 2017, at 17:19 , Jason Stevens wrote:

> I remember back in the original SCO vs the world days when SGi apparently dumped some 32v and was quickly dumped from Linux, there was some source auditing tool that they used?  All I remember is that it used the term 'shards' which of course is popular with the DB kids so it's hard to find... Now that there is an insane dump it'd be interesting to compare actual ancestry vs what we've always been told...
> 
> On March 6, 2017 11:33:18 PM GMT+08:00, Angelo Papenhoff <aap at papnet.eu> wrote:
> On 01/03/17, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>  Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
>  
>  Google it with:
>  
>  site:vetusware.com unix source
>  
>  Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
>  
> 
> Since we had some discussion about AIX recently I thought I should ask:
> Many sources claim AIX is Sys V derived. Hoever, the source code (of 4.1.3)
> does not look like Sys V at all. Does anyone know the history?
> 
> aap
> 
> -- 
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 1:00 PM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 8:21 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I once heard that some version of AIX was actually implemented in PL/I. I
>> strongly doubted that, and no one's mentioned it so I assume that's
>> apocryphal? It would be so distinctive that I can't imagine someone NOT
>> mentioning it if it were the case.
>>
>
> I spent about 6 years working with IBM and U. Penn on AIX and nothing of
> that was ever mentioned by anyone. It sounds like a myth.
>

I suspected as much. Thanks, folks.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[ron minnich]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 8:21 AM Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I once heard that some version of AIX was actually implemented in PL/I. I
> strongly doubted that, and no one's mentioned it so I assume that's
> apocryphal? It would be so distinctive that I can't imagine someone NOT
> mentioning it if it were the case.
>
>
I spent about 6 years working with IBM and U. Penn on AIX and nothing of
that was ever mentioned by anyone. It sounds like a myth.

ron
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 666 bytes --]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:57 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> The native port was either starting or soon to start, and there was some
> question about channel programming -- mainly, if the people who really knew
> how it worked were still at IBM, or even still alive. I guess they worked
> it out, however

​AIX/370 ran native at LCC and at a few university customers.
The truth is, if you were bought into IBM, you were probably running VM, so
it made sense to run it that way.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Ron Natalie]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3095 bytes --]

Channel programming wasn’t really at the time.   Maybe the guys at PASC didn’t know, but it was available.

 

Never saw anything written in PL/I there.    Now the other 370 mainframe stuff that wasn’t in assembler was written in PL/S which was sort of PL/I but not really.   They used it for TSO (suitable for kicking dead whales down the beach) and MVT (multiprocessing with a variable number of turds, part of the virtual toilet access protocol).

 

Of course, the RS/6000 AIX was completely different and somewhat weird.    I might buy it being written in PL/S.   I spent a lot of time over the years either pursuing security vulnerabilities or patching up ones that I had found.     IBM loaned us an RS/6000 and didn’t give me the root password.    This took me a while to figure out.    I found however that if you turned the key on the front to the service (wrench) position, it would boot up in a canned “diagostic” program.    I poked at this a while until I realized that the help program just spawned more and I could shell escape out to a root shell.

 

 

 

From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Dan Cross
Sent: Monday, March 6, 2017 11:21 AM
To: ron minnich
Cc: TUHS main list
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?

 

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:57 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

Yes, the AIX code looks nothing like SYS V. It's been 20+ years since I did a lot of work in AIX, and most of my work was in networking, external pagers, and NFS, and even there you could see it was different (although much of the NFS was clearly the Sun reference code, one giveaway being the Sun copyrights in it :-) I always thought it was an interesting code base -- they seemed to get preemptability right from the start, for example. As it was explained to me, IBM did a full implementation from manuals of both the kernel and the commands. 

 

There were lots of little weirdnesses in the commands. mkdir -p, for example, would give you an error if the directory existed -- they got the creation of the tree right, but the error wrong. There were tons of these little gotchas in the commands and it's one thing that made NTP and Condor, for just two examples, a real chore on AIX.

 

I visited the now-closed IBM Palo Alto center in 1991, and they told me an interesting AIX story. Seems to that point, on the mainframes, AIX had run under VM. The native port was either starting or soon to start, and there was some question about channel programming -- mainly, if the people who really knew how it worked were still at IBM, or even still alive. I guess they worked it out, however ;-)

 

I once heard that some version of AIX was actually implemented in PL/I. I strongly doubted that, and no one's mentioned it so I assume that's apocryphal? It would be so distinctive that I can't imagine someone NOT mentioning it if it were the case.

 

        - Dan C.

 

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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:57 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, the AIX code looks nothing like SYS V. It's been 20+ years since I
> did a lot of work in AIX, and most of my work was in networking, external
> pagers, and NFS, and even there you could see it was different (although
> much of the NFS was clearly the Sun reference code, one giveaway being the
> Sun copyrights in it :-) I always thought it was an interesting code base
> -- they seemed to get preemptability right from the start, for example. As
> it was explained to me, IBM did a full implementation from manuals of both
> the kernel and the commands.
>
> There were lots of little weirdnesses in the commands. mkdir -p, for
> example, would give you an error if the directory existed -- they got the
> creation of the tree right, but the error wrong. There were tons of these
> little gotchas in the commands and it's one thing that made NTP and Condor,
> for just two examples, a real chore on AIX.
>
> I visited the now-closed IBM Palo Alto center in 1991, and they told me an
> interesting AIX story. Seems to that point, on the mainframes, AIX had run
> under VM. The native port was either starting or soon to start, and there
> was some question about channel programming -- mainly, if the people who
> really knew how it worked were still at IBM, or even still alive. I guess
> they worked it out, however ;-)
>

I once heard that some version of AIX was actually implemented in PL/I. I
strongly doubted that, and no one's mentioned it so I assume that's
apocryphal? It would be so distinctive that I can't imagine someone NOT
mentioning it if it were the case.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1396 bytes --]

ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sun copyrights in it :-) I always thought it was an interesting code base
> -- they seemed to get preemptability right from the start, for example. As
> it was explained to me, IBM did a full implementation from manuals of both
> the kernel and the commands.

While some of the commands look like they have been taken from AT&T sources, 
there are bugs that make it obvious that people tried to implement things from 
Manuals:

-	uname for AIX-7.1 e.g. prints something that makes you assume you are
	on AIX-1.7. This is because the uname man page from AT&T is missleading
	and missunderstand the meaning of "revision" and "version".

I remember that around 1990 people called AIX either "Ain't unIX" or 
"Alien unIX". For the latter there was also the claim that one alien read the 
AT&T man page and told another alien on the phone how he expects things to be 
correct.

The kernel definitely looks like it was written from scratch.

The fact that there are functions like "issig()" make it obvious that the 
authors did have access to at least the V6 kernel via the Lions book.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Jason Stevens]

I remember back in the original SCO vs the world days when SGi apparently dumped some 32v and was quickly dumped from Linux, there was some source auditing tool that they used?  All I remember is that it used the term 'shards' which of course is popular with the DB kids so it's hard to find...  Now that there is an insane dump it'd be interesting to compare actual ancestry vs what we've always been told...

On March 6, 2017 11:33:18 PM GMT+08:00, Angelo Papenhoff <aap at papnet.eu> wrote:
>On 01/03/17, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
>> 
>> Google it with:
>> 
>> site:vetusware.com unix source
>> 
>> Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
>> 
>
>Since we had some discussion about AIX recently I thought I should ask:
>Many sources claim AIX is Sys V derived. Hoever, the source code (of
>4.1.3)
>does not look like Sys V at all. Does anyone know the history?
>
>aap

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

Can't speak for the *source trees* them themselves more than I have
already, as they came from all over - BL Research, USL, IBM itself, ISC,
LCC, UCB, CMU, MIT, etc...; but IBM negotiated a very extensive *SVR3
license* with AT&T and and marketed it primarily an System V based system
with "BSD & IBM specfic enhancements".

This license agreement was the basis for AIX shipments as well as all OSF
shipments.  While other places covered it, if you google around for
articles from "Unigram/X"(Maureen O'Garia's crew) in the years of 1990-2000
in particular  you should find a number of articles that described the
transactions and how it effected the "Unix Industry."


On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 10:33 AM, Angelo Papenhoff <aap at papnet.eu> wrote:

> On 01/03/17, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> > Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
> >
> > Google it with:
> >
> > site:vetusware.com unix source
> >
> > Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
> >
>
> Since we had some discussion about AIX recently I thought I should ask:
> Many sources claim AIX is Sys V derived. Hoever, the source code (of 4.1.3)
> does not look like Sys V at all. Does anyone know the history?
>
> aap
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[ron minnich]

Yes, the AIX code looks nothing like SYS V. It's been 20+ years since I did
a lot of work in AIX, and most of my work was in networking, external
pagers, and NFS, and even there you could see it was different (although
much of the NFS was clearly the Sun reference code, one giveaway being the
Sun copyrights in it :-) I always thought it was an interesting code base
-- they seemed to get preemptability right from the start, for example. As
it was explained to me, IBM did a full implementation from manuals of both
the kernel and the commands.

There were lots of little weirdnesses in the commands. mkdir -p, for
example, would give you an error if the directory existed -- they got the
creation of the tree right, but the error wrong. There were tons of these
little gotchas in the commands and it's one thing that made NTP and Condor,
for just two examples, a real chore on AIX.

I visited the now-closed IBM Palo Alto center in 1991, and they told me an
interesting AIX story. Seems to that point, on the mainframes, AIX had run
under VM. The native port was either starting or soon to start, and there
was some question about channel programming -- mainly, if the people who
really knew how it worked were still at IBM, or even still alive. I guess
they worked it out, however ;-)
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Angelo Papenhoff]

On 01/03/17, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
> 
> Google it with:
> 
> site:vetusware.com unix source
> 
> Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
> 

Since we had some discussion about AIX recently I thought I should ask:
Many sources claim AIX is Sys V derived. Hoever, the source code (of 4.1.3)
does not look like Sys V at all. Does anyone know the history?

aap

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 757 bytes --]

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> And once you have accepted it, the question left is since *Microfocus has
> the Unix rights from Novell, what are the formal state of the rights from
> Sun.*

We do nothing about what this company thinks of OpenSource. The state of the 
source that Novell can control or opensource is from 1995 and worth nothing for 
todays software development.

Whether someone is able to convince them to opensource it as a historical act 
is doubtful as well.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Josh Good]

On 2017 Mar  5, 20:15, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > Not be argumentative, but I do not think SCO matters at this point as I'm
> > under the impression that per IBM/SCO case the US courts have ruled - i.e.
> >
> >
> >
> > https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118678589019694632
> >
> > Court Ruling Gives Novell Copyright in Unix System
> > By
> > KEITH J. WINSTEIN and
> >
> > WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
> > Updated Aug. 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET
> >
> > A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is the
> > rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.
> 
> Novells claims are not very credible....
> 
> I mentioned that the USL laboratories from AT&T (including the people who work 
> there) have been handed over from AT&T to Novell and later to SCO.
> 
> It is most unlikely that these people did not terminate their contract in case 
> the ownership of the code has not been transfered to the respective new owner 
> of the company.

From here (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Novell,_Inc. ) we get
to here ( http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/SCONovellAssetAg.pdf ).

That --horrendous quality-- PDF document states what assets were sold
and transferred from Novell to SCO, and what assets where NOT sold nor
transferred.

And I quote from that PDF:

"""
ARTICLE I. Section 1.1.(a). Purchase and Sale of Assets. On the terms
and subject to the conditions set forth in this Agreement, Seller will
sell, convey, transfer, assign and deliver to Buyer and Buyer will
purchase and acquire from Seller on the Closing Date (as defined in
Section 1.7), all of Seller's rights, title and interest in and to the
assets and properties of Seller relating to the Business (collectively
the "Assets") identified on Schedule 1.1.(a) hereto. Notwithstanding the
foregoing, the Assets to be so purchased shall no include those assets
(the "Excluded Assets") set forth on Schedule 1.1.(b).
"""

"""
Schedule 1.1.(b).
Section V. Intellectual Property:
	A. All copyrights and trademarks, except for the trademarks UNIX
	and UnixWare.
	B. All Patents.
[...]
Section VIII. All rights, title and interest to the SVRx Royalties, less
the 5% fee for administering the collection thereof pursuant to Section
4.16 hereof.
"""

It is therefore clear SCO did NOT buy the UNIX System V copyrights from
Novell.  SCO bought the UnixWare business, and the right to collect
UNIX royalties in the name and for the benefit of Novell (except for
a 5% fee SCO was to keep of said royalties, in concept of collector of
said royalties).

This is not an "oral claim" of a "Novell employee" that the Court "chose
to believe". This is a written contract. Upheld by the Courts. 

It is beyond my understanding how would you qualify all that as "Novells
claims are not very credible".

You were in a recent post asking for "verifiable facts", yet you expound
(wrong) opinion against what are, in fact, "verifiable facts".

Regards,

-- 
Josh Good

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Mutiny]

"From: Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com>Sent: Mon, 06 Mar 2017 03:06:28"with such irrational and purely denouncing statements you blame yourself.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2017 at 08:10:28PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> While I was able to verify that you edited the system include files from 
> SunOS/Solaris to make them POSIX compliant, Is was not able to verify that you 
> worked on the kernel code. My conclusion therefore is that we both got our 
> information about the kernel from hearsay.

And once again you prove yourself to be mis-informed.  Would a referreed
Usenix paper about some of my kernel work be enough for your royal highness?

http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf

You, Joerg, have proven yourself to be disrespectful idiot and I've had
enough.  Why you are tolerated on this list is beyond me.  You are no
longer welcome in my mailbox and I'll be blissfully unaware of your
blather going forward.  Should have done this months ago.

:0:
* ^From:.*schily at schily.net.*
/dev/null

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

And frankly, I don't care one way or the other if Novell's position was
credible or not.   I care that the case was >>decided<< by the a court and
held up.  The court made a ruling... its' over.   stop arguing.. please...
That is why we have courts, no matter what country we live in.  The basic
premise is the same.

We do not have to like a courts ruling, we do have the accept them.  This
is not the first and will not the be last time that people may not agree
with the answer given, but we all have move on.   For instance, I and many
other people (in fact polls have shown in the USA most Americans agree with
me), think that OJ was guilty of murder, but what played out, that is not
how the court ruled.  But is does not matter that many us think he is
guilty of murder, the US courts do not; we have the accept it.

That was my point...  we have moved on with OJ.   The UNIX community has
moved on post IBM/SCO.  Its over, case decided.

What SCO did or did not do has not bearing on Sun. So it does not matter in
any way about Novell relationship with SCO/credible or otherwise.   Sun's
license was purely with Novell and the courts ruled that Novell owns that
IP -- the courts are clear.  We as a community have to accept that (any of
us can chose  to not like it that mind you, but we have to accept it).

And once you have accepted it, the question left is since *Microfocus has
the Unix rights from Novell, what are the formal state of the rights from
Sun.*

I frankly do not think anyone on this list really knows.  I know of no
formal statement from them or court with a position that can be
referenced.  What we have been asking is if we know if there is some one at
Microfocus we can approach to get such a statement one way or the other.

On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 12:15 PM, Joerg Schilling <schily at schily.net>
> wrote:
> > Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Not be argumentative, but I do not think SCO matters at this point as
> I'm
> >> under the impression that per IBM/SCO case the US courts have ruled -
> i.e.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118678589019694632
> >>
> >> Court Ruling Gives Novell Copyright in Unix System
> >> By
> >> KEITH J. WINSTEIN and
> >>
> >> WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
> >> Updated Aug. 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET
> >>
> >> A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is
> the
> >> rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.
> >
> > Novells claims are not very credible....
> >
> > I mentioned that the USL laboratories from AT&T (including the people
> who work
> > there) have been handed over from AT&T to Novell and later to SCO.
> >
> > It is most unlikely that these people did not terminate their contract
> in case
> > the ownership of the code has not been transfered to the respective new
> owner
> > of the company.
>
> The plain language of the contract that was on groklaw makes it clear
> that SCO got the rights to sell Unix, but since they didn't offer
> Novel enough money, the copyrights were specifically not included. SCO
> could sell and sublicense, but then had to pay Novel royalties back as
> the copyright holder instead of a larger up-front payment. The judge,
> correctly in my view, ruled that this was the proper interpretation of
> the contract. The testimony of the people that negotiated was needed
> to clear up the issue raised by SCO about the interpretation of the
> rather specific language in the contract and addenda. This body of
> evidence was developed rather extensively through both testimony, as
> well as evidence of payments by SCO to Novel that supported the view
> that SCO could sell licenses, but had to pay royalties back to Novel.
> They did this for several years before stopping and embarking on their
> ill-fated legal battle.
>
> So a judge disagrees with you, as a matter of law and fact, that
> Novel's claims are not credible. They are the ones that won the day,
> and won the day rather handily.
>
> All the details can be found at
> http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040319041857760
> which includes a large number of exhibits from people that were
> actually there, who had first-hand knowledge, etc. On the whole it
> seems quite credible. I know who I believe, given the choice.
>
> Warner
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Mar 5, 2017 at 12:15 PM, Joerg Schilling <schily at schily.net> wrote:
> Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
>> Not be argumentative, but I do not think SCO matters at this point as I'm
>> under the impression that per IBM/SCO case the US courts have ruled - i.e.
>>
>>
>>
>> https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118678589019694632
>>
>> Court Ruling Gives Novell Copyright in Unix System
>> By
>> KEITH J. WINSTEIN and
>>
>> WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
>> Updated Aug. 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET
>>
>> A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is the
>> rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.
>
> Novells claims are not very credible....
>
> I mentioned that the USL laboratories from AT&T (including the people who work
> there) have been handed over from AT&T to Novell and later to SCO.
>
> It is most unlikely that these people did not terminate their contract in case
> the ownership of the code has not been transfered to the respective new owner
> of the company.

The plain language of the contract that was on groklaw makes it clear
that SCO got the rights to sell Unix, but since they didn't offer
Novel enough money, the copyrights were specifically not included. SCO
could sell and sublicense, but then had to pay Novel royalties back as
the copyright holder instead of a larger up-front payment. The judge,
correctly in my view, ruled that this was the proper interpretation of
the contract. The testimony of the people that negotiated was needed
to clear up the issue raised by SCO about the interpretation of the
rather specific language in the contract and addenda. This body of
evidence was developed rather extensively through both testimony, as
well as evidence of payments by SCO to Novel that supported the view
that SCO could sell licenses, but had to pay royalties back to Novel.
They did this for several years before stopping and embarking on their
ill-fated legal battle.

So a judge disagrees with you, as a matter of law and fact, that
Novel's claims are not credible. They are the ones that won the day,
and won the day rather handily.

All the details can be found at
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20040319041857760
which includes a large number of exhibits from people that were
actually there, who had first-hand knowledge, etc. On the whole it
seems quite credible. I know who I believe, given the choice.

Warner

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

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Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Not be argumentative, but I do not think SCO matters at this point as I'm
> under the impression that per IBM/SCO case the US courts have ruled - i.e.
>
>
>
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118678589019694632
>
> Court Ruling Gives Novell Copyright in Unix System
> By
> KEITH J. WINSTEIN and
>
> WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
> Updated Aug. 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET
>
> A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is the
> rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.

Novells claims are not very credible....

I mentioned that the USL laboratories from AT&T (including the people who work 
there) have been handed over from AT&T to Novell and later to SCO.

It is most unlikely that these people did not terminate their contract in case 
the ownership of the code has not been transfered to the respective new owner 
of the company.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

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Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 05, 2017 at 07:26:23PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> > give verifyable statements.
>
> I wouldn't have to say anything if you did that.  I can't remember a
> single time you were correct when you were talking about Sun history
> when I was there.  Maybe there was such a time but by all the statements
> I remember you making were way off the mark.
>
> As the person who is making claims, the onus is on you to provide
> references when you are challenged.  I don't want to argue with you and
> I'm not going to.  If you want people to believe you, however, you're
> gonna need to back up your claims with, as you say, verifyable statements.

If your claims have been verifyable, I of course would have corrected myself.

While I was able to verify that you edited the system include files from 
SunOS/Solaris to make them POSIX compliant, Is was not able to verify that you 
worked on the kernel code. My conclusion therefore is that we both got our 
information about the kernel from hearsay.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Mar 05, 2017 at 07:26:23PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > So once again this doesn't match my memory.  I'm done arguing with Joerg,
> > just noting that I don't believe that his information is accurate.  It
> > would be nice to get the real info from someone who was at Sun at the
> > time.
> 
> give verifyable statements.

I wouldn't have to say anything if you did that.  I can't remember a
single time you were correct when you were talking about Sun history
when I was there.  Maybe there was such a time but by all the statements
I remember you making were way off the mark.

As the person who is making claims, the onus is on you to provide
references when you are challenged.  I don't want to argue with you and
I'm not going to.  If you want people to believe you, however, you're
gonna need to back up your claims with, as you say, verifyable statements.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

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Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> So once again this doesn't match my memory.  I'm done arguing with Joerg,
> just noting that I don't believe that his information is accurate.  It
> would be nice to get the real info from someone who was at Sun at the
> time.

This is a really strange way to deal with a different memory.

Given that Larry does not even mention what he has in his memory and as his 
previous claims have only been partially verifyable, his mail must be seen as 
non-helpful.

It however may help to mention that from my memory, Larry was no longer at Sun
when Sun bought the additional rights from Novell (which happened IIRC in late 
1994).


Larry: please try to be constructive. If you believe I am wrong, explain where 
and if you have different memory, give verifyable statements. My statements are 
taken from statements from people who have been Sun employees during the time 
in question and from one of the few SCO employees that survived the SCO story 
up to xinuos.com.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Mutiny]

'Now that a judge ignored the contract between Novell and SCO and followed the oral claims from a Novell employee, it seems that somebody would need to convince Novell. I doubt that this will have a chance to work.'sounds very plausible to me.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

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jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) wrote:

>     > From: Wesley Parish
>
>     > I think the best thing for all would be the release of the Unix SysV
>     > source trees under a suitable open source license.

> Any volunteers to make something actually happen?

As mentioned before, Sun in theory had the right, but this did not include the 
networking code and code that includes code from Xenix (e.g. ls.c).

Now that Oracle bought Sun, there is few chance even for that because Oracle is 
not known to be OSS friendly.

The other rights owner was SCO....

SCO has been OSS friendly. SCO created the historical UNIX license and a bit
later, I was able to convince SCO to make SCCS OpenSource and got a "final" 
OK in April 2001. But in May 2001, SCO was sold to Caldera Linux and the new
owner was not OSS friendly and canceled the agreement.

This caused a delay for making SCCS OpenSource, as I now had to convince Sun 
and succeeded in December 2006.

Now that a judge ignored the contract between Novell and SCO and followed the 
oral claims from a Novell employee, it seems that somebody would need to 
convince Novell. I doubt that this will have a chance to work.


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

So once again this doesn't match my memory.  I'm done arguing with Joerg,
just noting that I don't believe that his information is accurate.  It
would be nice to get the real info from someone who was at Sun at the
time.

On Sat, Mar 04, 2017 at 11:04:04AM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> Aprox. half of the code from Svr4 was written by Sun anyway. AT&T still 
> believed that they owneed all of the code ans required Sunto pay royalties.
> 
> Sun for this reason started to negotiate a buy out with AT&T. They agreed that 
> Sun pays 3 years of royalties at once and then gets the same rights as AT&T.
> Shoirt before the contract was signed, AT&T handed over the code to Novell for 
> less than what Sun should pay to AT&T.
> 
> Sun then continued the negotiation with Novell and finally did the deal that 
> included the right to sub-license the code to an arbitrary number of customers.
> 
> Thia was around 1994/1995 and it took Sun Lawyers upt to y2000 to decide that 
> the right to sub-licence includess the right to make it OpenSource.
> 
> In y2000, Sun published aprox. 95%% of the Solaris-ON code but this did not 
> include the source ls.c because it contained 3 lines from Microsoft/Xenix.
> It also missed the kernel networking code.
> 
> > The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
> > use.  I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the specifics
> > please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking in
> > it.   Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
> > SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the streams
> > code.   The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
> > about the AT&T version?
> >
> > I have heard different legal folks say it was both still "closed" and
> > others say, it was now opened.
> 
> AFAIK, there never was a streams based networking code in Svr4 from AT&T.
> The "original" code was from Lachman but it was slow so Sun bought new code 
> from Mentat inc for Solaris 2.3 (IIRC). Sun then soon hired all important 
> people from Mentat and enhanced the code, but missed to buy Mentat itself.
> 
> As a result, Sun could not OpenSource the Mentat networking code. Fortunately, 
> this code was not fast enough for 1/10 GB ETH and needed a major rewrite 
> anyway. So Sun management did give the OK for the rewrite that finally made it 
> possible to Opensource 99% of Solaris-on in June 2005.
> 
> Let me finally give some information about SCO....
> 
> Sun bought a license from SCO for two reasons:
> 
> -	The permission to use the NIC drivers from SCO.
> 	Then it tourned out that that SCO did use something similar but
> 	incompatible to the Solaris GLC NIC abstraction layer.
> 
> -	The permission to use "lxrun", but then a group of people inside
> 	Sun wrote a new subsystem from scratch and caused the other group
> 	to become the looser of an internal dispute.
> 
> A friend is one of the people who did work for the SCO kernel group before SCO 
> was bought by Caldera Linux and later renamed to SCO... The lawsuit was 
> initiated by the Caldera Linux people and not by the "former" SCO people.
> 
> He is still working for the company that now owns sco.com and that now 
> redirects to the new company name xinuos.com. They still have the ELF standard 
> documents and AT&T UNIX documentation online. Their business is now FreeBSD 
> based as they did not have the momentum to make UnixWare a 64 bit system. While 
> I implemented Joliet and ISO-9660:1999 support for them, I noticed that the 
> code was not very 64 bit clean in general....
> 
> 
> Finally something about the way the code way sold:
> 
> Novell bought not only the source code and the license but the building and the 
> USL people in New Jersey as well. When they later sold UNIX to SCO, they  of
> course sold the USL location and people as well. IIRC, SCO did even present 
> a contract for that fact but the judge did rather believe the oral claims from 
> the Novell people.
> 
> While I was implementing Joliet and ISOI-9660:1999 I had to discusss things 
> with the former USL people from New Jersey.
> 
> J?rg
> 
> -- 
>  EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
>        joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
>  URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Jacob Goense]

On 2017-03-04 21:39, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> They have a DMCA archival exemption.

The librarian exemption is for archiving, not distribution.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Cory Smelosky]

They have a DMCA archival exemption.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 4, 2017, at 09:53, Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
>> On 2017-03-04 10:39, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
>> Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually _doing_
>> something, any talk is ... just that.
> 
> Archive.org just blatantly hosts whatever they find until they get complaints
> and seem to get away with it. eg.
> 
> https://archive.org/details/ATTUNIXSystemVRelease4Version2

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Ron Natalie]

Simple... OCILLA.


-----Original Message-----
From: TUHS [mailto:tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org] On Behalf Of Steve Nickolas
Sent: Saturday, March 4, 2017 1:37 PM
To: Jacob Goense
Cc: tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org; jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?

On Sat, 4 Mar 2017, Jacob Goense wrote:

> On 2017-03-04 10:39, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
>> Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually 
>> _doing_ something, any talk is ... just that.
>
> Archive.org just blatantly hosts whatever they find until they get 
> complaints and seem to get away with it. eg.
>
> <SNIP>

I don't know how they haven't been C&D'd out of existence by now.

-uso.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2017, Jacob Goense wrote:

> On 2017-03-04 10:39, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
>> Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually _doing_
>> something, any talk is ... just that.
>
> Archive.org just blatantly hosts whatever they find until they get complaints
> and seem to get away with it. eg.
>
> <SNIP>

I don't know how they haven't been C&D'd out of existence by now.

-uso.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Jacob Goense]

On 2017-03-04 10:39, jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu wrote:
> Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually 
> _doing_
> something, any talk is ... just that.

Archive.org just blatantly hosts whatever they find until they get 
complaints
and seem to get away with it. eg.

https://archive.org/details/ATTUNIXSystemVRelease4Version2

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

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On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 11:28 AM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Not be argumentative, but I do not think SCO matters at this point


​That was probably a little to harsh... except for SCO's own IP...  but for
the base UNIX IP, i.e. SVR3, R4, etc.. the US courts decided it was
Novell's property. ​ The question is what is/was IBM and Sun's license with
them associated.  So far the courts have said int eh case of IBM it was
allowed to put anything in Linux it.

What we really need is a definitive statement from microfocus making SVRx
available.

The other side piece I wonder about, was the AT&T/UI et al was planning and
starting to work with Chorus?   What happened to that work?   Where did it
end up?  Does anyone know?

Clem
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

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Not be argumentative, but I do not think SCO matters at this point as I'm
under the impression that per IBM/SCO case the US courts have ruled - i.e.



https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118678589019694632

Court Ruling Gives Novell Copyright in Unix System
By
KEITH J. WINSTEIN and

WILLIAM M. BULKELEY
Updated Aug. 11, 2007 12:01 a.m. ET

A federal court in Utah ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO Group Inc., is the
rightful owner of the copyright in the Unix operating system.



Groklaw reports (and, as usual, has the actual decision) that SCO Group has
just lost virtually everything left of its lawsuits against IBM and Novell
over Linux.

According to the ruling issued today by U.S. District Court Judge Dale
Kimball:

* Novell is the owner of the Unix copyrights. As a result, SCO’s suit
gainst Novell for “slander of title” is dismissed.
* Novell also has the contractual right to waive any claims of misuse of
Unix by IBM (which Novell has repeatedly done). As a result, much if not
all of SCO’s suit against IBM will shortly be dismissed.
* SCO must pay Novell at least some of the license fees paid under its SCO
Source program by Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and other licensees.

On Sat, Mar 4, 2017 at 5:04 AM, Joerg Schilling <schily at schily.net> wrote:

> Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> > I've been given two different interpretations so I'm not sure who to
> > believe.  I really would like to hear a lawyer from Oracle (ney Sun) for
> > Micro Focus (ney - At&t -> Novell) make a statement.
> >
> > I believe the issue is that Sun was given something called "complete
> > rights", similar to what IBM had( which is how OSF was licensed - from
> the
> > IBM one).   This was interpreted to believe they could anything with it
> > with anything >>they<< did.   That is to say, if they hacked on the
> kernel
> > and published there kernel, then the parts that came from AT&T could be
> > also.
>
> Aprox. half of the code from Svr4 was written by Sun anyway. AT&T still
> believed that they owneed all of the code ans required Sunto pay royalties.
>
> Sun for this reason started to negotiate a buy out with AT&T. They agreed
> that
> Sun pays 3 years of royalties at once and then gets the same rights as
> AT&T.
> Shoirt before the contract was signed, AT&T handed over the code to Novell
> for
> less than what Sun should pay to AT&T.
>
> Sun then continued the negotiation with Novell and finally did the deal
> that
> included the right to sub-license the code to an arbitrary number of
> customers.
>
> Thia was around 1994/1995 and it took Sun Lawyers upt to y2000 to decide
> that
> the right to sub-licence includess the right to make it OpenSource.
>
> In y2000, Sun published aprox. 95%% of the Solaris-ON code but this did not
> include the source ls.c because it contained 3 lines from Microsoft/Xenix.
> It also missed the kernel networking code.
>
> > The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
> > use.  I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the
> specifics
> > please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking in
> > it.   Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
> > SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the
> streams
> > code.   The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
> > about the AT&T version?
> >
> > I have heard different legal folks say it was both still "closed" and
> > others say, it was now opened.
>
> AFAIK, there never was a streams based networking code in Svr4 from AT&T.
> The "original" code was from Lachman but it was slow so Sun bought new code
> from Mentat inc for Solaris 2.3 (IIRC). Sun then soon hired all important
> people from Mentat and enhanced the code, but missed to buy Mentat itself.
>
> As a result, Sun could not OpenSource the Mentat networking code.
> Fortunately,
> this code was not fast enough for 1/10 GB ETH and needed a major rewrite
> anyway. So Sun management did give the OK for the rewrite that finally
> made it
> possible to Opensource 99% of Solaris-on in June 2005.
>
> Let me finally give some information about SCO....
>
> Sun bought a license from SCO for two reasons:
>
> -       The permission to use the NIC drivers from SCO.
>         Then it tourned out that that SCO did use something similar but
>         incompatible to the Solaris GLC NIC abstraction layer.
>
> -       The permission to use "lxrun", but then a group of people inside
>         Sun wrote a new subsystem from scratch and caused the other group
>         to become the looser of an internal dispute.
>
> A friend is one of the people who did work for the SCO kernel group before
> SCO
> was bought by Caldera Linux and later renamed to SCO... The lawsuit was
> initiated by the Caldera Linux people and not by the "former" SCO people.
>
> He is still working for the company that now owns sco.com and that now
> redirects to the new company name xinuos.com. They still have the ELF
> standard
> documents and AT&T UNIX documentation online. Their business is now FreeBSD
> based as they did not have the momentum to make UnixWare a 64 bit system.
> While
> I implemented Joliet and ISO-9660:1999 support for them, I noticed that the
> code was not very 64 bit clean in general....
>
>
> Finally something about the way the code way sold:
>
> Novell bought not only the source code and the license but the building
> and the
> USL people in New Jersey as well. When they later sold UNIX to SCO, they
> of
> course sold the USL location and people as well. IIRC, SCO did even present
> a contract for that fact but the judge did rather believe the oral claims
> from
> the Novell people.
>
> While I was implementing Joliet and ISOI-9660:1999 I had to discusss things
> with the former USL people from New Jersey.
>
> Jörg
>
> --
>  EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353
> Berlin
>        joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
> http://schily.blogspot.com/
>  URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/
> projects/schilytools/files/
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Jason Stevens]

I've always wanted to buy into a source license then take in unpaid interns and give them access to the code...  

Although I guess that is pretty subversive?

I'll have to email Microfocus again ...

On March 4, 2017 11:39:27 PM GMT+08:00, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>    > From: Wesley Parish
>
> > I think the best thing for all would be the release of the Unix SysV
>    > source trees under a suitable open source license.
>
>You may think that; I may think that, we _all_ may think that.
>
>But in the legal world, that, and $2 (or whatever the going rate is
>these
>days) will get you a cup of coffee.
>
>Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually
>_doing_
>something, any talk is ... just that.
>
>Any volunteers to make something actually happen?
>
>	Noel

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Wesley Parish

    > I think the best thing for all would be the release of the Unix SysV
    > source trees under a suitable open source license.

You may think that; I may think that, we _all_ may think that.

But in the legal world, that, and $2 (or whatever the going rate is these
days) will get you a cup of coffee.

Unless someone is prepared to chivvy a rights-holder into actually _doing_
something, any talk is ... just that.

Any volunteers to make something actually happen?

	Noel

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Arthur Krewat]

Thanks for the link ... archiving commencing.


On 3/3/2017 10:29 PM, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 01:01:34PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote:
>> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
> I'll also mention https://winworldpc.com/library/   and I've spent
> a few days grabbing stuff from this to add to the hidden archive.
>
> Yes, I'm glad it's there so I can grab the stuff and stash it.
> No, once it's stashed I'm not going to give it out.
> Yes, there is a significant level of hypocrisy here.
>
> Cheers, Warren

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4624 bytes --]

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> I've been given two different interpretations so I'm not sure who to
> believe.  I really would like to hear a lawyer from Oracle (ney Sun) for
> Micro Focus (ney - At&t -> Novell) make a statement.
>
> I believe the issue is that Sun was given something called "complete
> rights", similar to what IBM had( which is how OSF was licensed - from the
> IBM one).   This was interpreted to believe they could anything with it
> with anything >>they<< did.   That is to say, if they hacked on the kernel
> and published there kernel, then the parts that came from AT&T could be
> also.

Aprox. half of the code from Svr4 was written by Sun anyway. AT&T still 
believed that they owneed all of the code ans required Sunto pay royalties.

Sun for this reason started to negotiate a buy out with AT&T. They agreed that 
Sun pays 3 years of royalties at once and then gets the same rights as AT&T.
Shoirt before the contract was signed, AT&T handed over the code to Novell for 
less than what Sun should pay to AT&T.

Sun then continued the negotiation with Novell and finally did the deal that 
included the right to sub-license the code to an arbitrary number of customers.

Thia was around 1994/1995 and it took Sun Lawyers upt to y2000 to decide that 
the right to sub-licence includess the right to make it OpenSource.

In y2000, Sun published aprox. 95%% of the Solaris-ON code but this did not 
include the source ls.c because it contained 3 lines from Microsoft/Xenix.
It also missed the kernel networking code.

> The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
> use.  I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the specifics
> please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking in
> it.   Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
> SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the streams
> code.   The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
> about the AT&T version?
>
> I have heard different legal folks say it was both still "closed" and
> others say, it was now opened.

AFAIK, there never was a streams based networking code in Svr4 from AT&T.
The "original" code was from Lachman but it was slow so Sun bought new code 
from Mentat inc for Solaris 2.3 (IIRC). Sun then soon hired all important 
people from Mentat and enhanced the code, but missed to buy Mentat itself.

As a result, Sun could not OpenSource the Mentat networking code. Fortunately, 
this code was not fast enough for 1/10 GB ETH and needed a major rewrite 
anyway. So Sun management did give the OK for the rewrite that finally made it 
possible to Opensource 99% of Solaris-on in June 2005.

Let me finally give some information about SCO....

Sun bought a license from SCO for two reasons:

-	The permission to use the NIC drivers from SCO.
	Then it tourned out that that SCO did use something similar but
	incompatible to the Solaris GLC NIC abstraction layer.

-	The permission to use "lxrun", but then a group of people inside
	Sun wrote a new subsystem from scratch and caused the other group
	to become the looser of an internal dispute.

A friend is one of the people who did work for the SCO kernel group before SCO 
was bought by Caldera Linux and later renamed to SCO... The lawsuit was 
initiated by the Caldera Linux people and not by the "former" SCO people.

He is still working for the company that now owns sco.com and that now 
redirects to the new company name xinuos.com. They still have the ELF standard 
documents and AT&T UNIX documentation online. Their business is now FreeBSD 
based as they did not have the momentum to make UnixWare a 64 bit system. While 
I implemented Joliet and ISO-9660:1999 support for them, I noticed that the 
code was not very 64 bit clean in general....


Finally something about the way the code way sold:

Novell bought not only the source code and the license but the building and the 
USL people in New Jersey as well. When they later sold UNIX to SCO, they  of
course sold the USL location and people as well. IIRC, SCO did even present 
a contract for that fact but the judge did rather believe the oral claims from 
the Novell people.

While I was implementing Joliet and ISOI-9660:1999 I had to discusss things 
with the former USL people from New Jersey.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warren Toomey]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 01:01:34PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?

I'll also mention https://winworldpc.com/library/   and I've spent
a few days grabbing stuff from this to add to the hidden archive.

Yes, I'm glad it's there so I can grab the stuff and stash it.
No, once it's stashed I'm not going to give it out.
Yes, there is a significant level of hypocrisy here.

Cheers, Warren
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Nick Downing]

Yes. And I just want to point out the systems vendor's worst nightmare:
Competition from an earlier version of their own product. History is
littered with examples where something was deliberately left to wither and
die for this reason.

Apple II and IIgs: We all know that the IIgs was deliberately crippled, and
then discontinued in favour of the IIc+, as it presented a viable
alternative to the 68000-based Macs.

680x0 Macs: Apparently some licensees had 68060 Macs and accelerators in
the works, but Apple refused access to the ROMs to add the 68060 support
code, because it would have been a viable alternative to the PowerPC 603.

IBM OS/2: Was heavily DOS based (I believe it used the INT 21h API with
modifications for protected mode), but in fact was eclipsed by later
versions of DOS/Windows that were retrofitted with things like DPMI
support, hacky but effective in providing a viable alternative to OS/2.

BSD and SysIII: For a while it looked like the 32V-derived BSDs were going
provide a viable alternative to AT&T's official developments of the same,
and it took some heavy handed legal and political manouevring and backroom
deals to make sure that did not happen in the end.

AMD64 and Itanium: Enough said, a very expensive egg on face episode for
Intel. 8086/8088 and iAPX432: Same thing except it was actually Intel's own
product that provided a viable alternative to the "official" new version
rather than a competitor's development of it. Of course a similar story can
be told about 8080/Z80/8085/8086, Intel faced stiff competition from an
enhanced version of their own product before wresting back control with the
much improved 8086. A nightmare for them.

That's the real reason vendors won't open source.

Nick

On Mar 4, 2017 12:02 PM, "Henry Bent" <henry.r.bent at gmail.com> wrote:

On 3 March 2017 at 18:56, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> wrote:

>
> And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think
> Novell was much more than a
> caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the last SysVR4 release of any
> consequence was Solaris - has
> Oracle done anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be
> the release of the Unix SysV
> source trees under a suitable open source license.


There was an SVR5, even if it was not nearly the popular product that its
predecessors were.  While development certainly slowed, it contained some
amount of technological progression.  Obviously at this point development
has stopped completely and it probably does make sense to open source that
code base.


> (I've made a similar argument for the IBM/MS OS/2,
> DEC VAX VMS, and MS Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various
> other Internet forums:
> the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn door now.
> Better to get the credit for
> being friendly and open, and clear up some residual bugs while you're at
> it ... )


Equating VMS, old versions of Windows, etc. isn't quite the same.  Even old
versions of those products may well include source that contains, or is
believed by its owners to contain, novel ideas or novel implementations of
existing ideas that may have survived relatively unchanged in newer
versions.  And because there is at least a reasonably sized user base for
all of the products you mentioned, corporate customers have an interest in
protecting their investment, and the software creators have an interest in
responding to the desires (or perceived desires) of their customers.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a legal release of the VMS 5 source,
or Windows 3 source, or classic Macintosh source.  I'm just not holding my
breath.  I think the community's time would be better spend advocating for
source releases of products that are truly dead or all but dead.

-Henry
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Henry Bent]

On 3 March 2017 at 18:56, Wesley Parish <wes.parish at paradise.net.nz> wrote:

>
> And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think
> Novell was much more than a
> caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the last SysVR4 release of any
> consequence was Solaris - has
> Oracle done anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be
> the release of the Unix SysV
> source trees under a suitable open source license.


There was an SVR5, even if it was not nearly the popular product that its
predecessors were.  While development certainly slowed, it contained some
amount of technological progression.  Obviously at this point development
has stopped completely and it probably does make sense to open source that
code base.


> (I've made a similar argument for the IBM/MS OS/2,
> DEC VAX VMS, and MS Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various
> other Internet forums:
> the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn door now.
> Better to get the credit for
> being friendly and open, and clear up some residual bugs while you're at
> it ... )


Equating VMS, old versions of Windows, etc. isn't quite the same.  Even old
versions of those products may well include source that contains, or is
believed by its owners to contain, novel ideas or novel implementations of
existing ideas that may have survived relatively unchanged in newer
versions.  And because there is at least a reasonably sized user base for
all of the products you mentioned, corporate customers have an interest in
protecting their investment, and the software creators have an interest in
responding to the desires (or perceived desires) of their customers.

Don't get me wrong - I'd love to see a legal release of the VMS 5 source,
or Windows 3 source, or classic Macintosh source.  I'm just not holding my
breath.  I think the community's time would be better spend advocating for
source releases of products that are truly dead or all but dead.

-Henry
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2017, Wesley Parish wrote:

> And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think 
> Novell was much more than a caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the 
> last SysVR4 release of any consequence was Solaris - has Oracle done 
> anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be the release 
> of the Unix SysV source trees under a suitable open source license. 
> (I've made a similar argument for the IBM/MS OS/2, DEC VAX VMS, and MS 
> Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various other Internet 
> forums: the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn 
> door now. Better to get the credit for being friendly and open, and 
> clear up some residual bugs while you're at it ... )

I agree pretty much across the board.

To be fair, I'd like to start from SysV and create a traditional 
implementation of that for my own personal neckbeard use, but using a 
kernel, such as Linux, that has decent modern hardware support.  And I've 
tried doing that, I'm just lost as to where to begin. ;)

-uso.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Wesley Parish]

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one of TV or in a play or any such thing.

My position on this is the result of hanging around Groklaw during The SCO Group - Caldera renamed 
and repurposed - versus Linux and the World shenanigans; namely, it's valuable mostly for historical 
reasons or as some would have it, hysterical raisins. The actual "IP" - intellectual property - has been 
dispersed now for so many years through so many channels that the actual Unix source tree copyrights 
don't serve much of the original purpose of copyright any more. I'm sure we can name any number of 
reimplementations of the various stages of the Unix development - Minix 1.x and Coherent for the V6-
7 interfaces, Schweitzer's Tunix for Unix SysVR3, the BSDs, Linux, etc for various stages of BSD and 
POSIX, and OpenSolaris for the latter stages of SysVR4 and so on.

And since the central Unix source trees have been static - I don't think Novell was much more than a 
caretaker, correct me if I'm wrong - and the last SysVR4 release of any consequence was Solaris - has 
Oracle done anything with it? - I think the best thing for all would be the release of the Unix SysV 
source trees under a suitable open source license. (I've made a similar argument for the IBM/MS OS/2, 
DEC VAX VMS, and MS Windows and WinNT 3.x and 4.x source trees on various other Internet forums: 
the horse has bolted, it's a bit pointless welding shut the barn door now. Better to get the credit for 
being friendly and open, and clear up some residual bugs while you're at it ... )

My 0.02c on this matter, and don't spend it all at once! :)

Wesley Parish

Quoting Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>:

> I've been given two different interpretations so I'm not sure who to
> believe. I really would like to hear a lawyer from Oracle (ney Sun) for
> Micro Focus (ney - At&t -> Novell) make a statement.
> 
> I believe the issue is that Sun was given something called "complete
> rights", similar to what IBM had( which is how OSF was licensed - from
> the
> IBM one). This was interpreted to believe they could anything with it
> with anything >>they<< did. That is to say, if they hacked on the
> kernel
> and published there kernel, then the parts that came from AT&T could be
> also.
> 
> The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
> use. I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the
> specifics
> please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking
> in
> it. Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
> SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the
> streams
> code. The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
> about the AT&T version?
> 
> I have heard different legal folks say it was both still "closed" and
> others say, it was now opened.
> 
> I don't know. I'm not willing or have I ever worked for anyone that has
> believed it was now "free."
> 
> I do tend to think of 32V and before as generally open technology. I
> come
> to that between the UCB regents position, one hand, much less the
> publishing of books like the Lions' book years ago. There have been
> publications of how things like SVR3 and SVR4 >>worked<< but I don't
> know
> of source being included the same way the Lions text. If that were
> done,
> I would be more comfortable.
> 
> That said, I do feel like its time it >>should<< be made available; but
> the
> IP is I guess owned by Micro Focus.
> 
> Clem
> 
> On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> > > From: Warner Losh
> >
> > > On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >>> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal
> > to
> > >>> distribute.
> >
> > >> surely there are big chunks of the opensolaris code that are not
> > *very
> > >> much* changed from the original System V code they're based on.
> > Under
> > >> what theory, then, was Sun the copyright holder and therefore able
> > to
> > >> release it under the CDDL?
> >
> > > Their paid-up perpetual license that granted them the right to do
> > that?
> >
> > I wonder, if they do indeed have such a license, if they have the
> rights to
> > distribute original SysV source under the CDDL? Or does that license
> only
> > apply to SysV code that they have modified? And if so, _how much_ does
> it
> > have
> > to be modified, to qualify?
> >
> > Maybe we can get them to distribute SysV under the CDDL... :-)
> >
> > Noel
> >
> >
>  



"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar

"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 03:28:27PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
> use.  I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the specifics
> please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking in
> it.   Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
> SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the streams
> code.   The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
> about the AT&T version?

I can't speak to the legal stuff but Solaris shipped with
Convergent/Lachman's TCP/IP stack.  Briefly if at all.  Then Mentat was
contracted to do a higher performance TCP/IP which was a bloody mess if
I recall correctly.  Full of "fast paths" that worked around the STREAMS
shortcomings.

Sun would have been far far better off doing what you did at Stellar.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

I've been given two different interpretations so I'm not sure who to
believe.  I really would like to hear a lawyer from Oracle (ney Sun) for
Micro Focus (ney - At&t -> Novell) make a statement.

I believe the issue is that Sun was given something called "complete
rights", similar to what IBM had( which is how OSF was licensed - from the
IBM one).   This was interpreted to believe they could anything with it
with anything >>they<< did.   That is to say, if they hacked on the kernel
and published there kernel, then the parts that came from AT&T could be
also.

The question is what happens to the code that got from AT&T but did not
use.  I'm going to be hypothetical here, Larry correct me to the specifics
please as I never saw Solaris sources, but SVR4 had Streams Networking in
it.   Let's say the Solaris pulled that out like we did at Stellar with
SVR3 and put a BBN or BSD style stack back in and never shipped the streams
code.   The Network stack they did publish would be available, but what
about the AT&T version?

I have heard different legal folks say it was both still "closed" and
others say, it was now opened.

I don't know.   I'm not willing or have I ever worked for anyone that has
believed it was now "free."

I do tend to think of 32V and before as generally open technology.  I come
to that between the UCB regents position, one hand, much less the
publishing of books like the Lions' book years ago.   There have been
publications of how things like SVR3 and SVR4 >>worked<< but I don't know
of source being included the same way the Lions text.   If that were done,
I would be more comfortable.

That said, I do feel like its time it >>should<< be made available; but the
IP is I guess owned by Micro Focus.

Clem

On Fri, Mar 3, 2017 at 3:06 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: Warner Losh
>
>     > On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>     >>> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal
> to
>     >>> distribute.
>
>     >> surely there are big chunks of the opensolaris code that are not
> *very
>     >> much* changed from the original System V code they're based on.
> Under
>     >> what theory, then, was Sun the copyright holder and therefore able
> to
>     >> release it under the CDDL?
>
>     > Their paid-up perpetual license that granted them the right to do
> that?
>
> I wonder, if they do indeed have such a license, if they have the rights to
> distribute original SysV source under the CDDL? Or does that license only
> apply to SysV code that they have modified? And if so, _how much_ does it
> have
> to be modified, to qualify?
>
> Maybe we can get them to distribute SysV under the CDDL... :-)
>
>       Noel
>
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Warner Losh

    > On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

    >>> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
    >>> distribute.

    >> surely there are big chunks of the opensolaris code that are not *very
    >> much* changed from the original System V code they're based on. Under
    >> what theory, then, was Sun the copyright holder and therefore able to
    >> release it under the CDDL?

    > Their paid-up perpetual license that granted them the right to do that?

I wonder, if they do indeed have such a license, if they have the rights to
distribute original SysV source under the CDDL? Or does that license only
apply to SysV code that they have modified? And if so, _how much_ does it have
to be modified, to qualify?

Maybe we can get them to distribute SysV under the CDDL... :-)

      Noel

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Jim Capp]

Many of you are probably aware of this site, but for those who aren't, please check out http://www.groklaw.net/ 


It is a blog that focused primarily on the law suit of SCO vs. IBM, but has many other interesting reads related to UNIX source code. 


Cheers, 


Jim 


From: "Paul Ruizendaal" <pnr@planet.nl> 
To: "TUHS main list" <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> 
Sent: Thursday, March 2, 2017 8:55:44 AM 
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance? 


On 1 Mar 2017, at 21:28 , Clem Cole wrote: 

> 1.) UCB Regents Position per AT&T/BSDi/UCB - anything through 32V is public domain (see groklaw) 

I think the USL lawyers feared that a jury might side with the Regents' position and therefore preferred to settle. Making the settlement secret was a clever idea and if it wasn't for Linux happening might have succeeded. 

Even if the position taken by the USB Regents would not hold up in court, than anything through to and including 32V is still available under the BSD-style license granted by Caldera Inc. (see http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf). It was later established in court that Caldera did not hold copyrights to Unix, but that Novell did at that time. However, Caldera was the licensing agent for Novell and had broad rights to grant licenses (and collect license fees as applicable). Novell had the right to overrule Caldera if it felt such was necessary. It did so when Caldera revoked IBM's license. It did not overrule the "ancient unix" license, even though it was aware of it. Renouncing it 15+ years later probably won't stick. 

Caldera (later renamed TSG) went bankrupt around 2011 and I'm not sure where the licensing agency went - perhaps it lapsed. Novell was acquired by Attachmate in 2010, which was acquired by British firm Micro Focus in 2014. Presumably they now hold the copyrights to the Unix source code. If so, perhaps they can be convinced to extend the BSD-style license to later versions, e.g. extend it up to SysV/R4. 

Note I'm not a lawyer and just expressing opinion. 

Paul 



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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Paul Ruizendaal]

On 1 Mar 2017, at 21:28 , Clem Cole wrote:

> 1.) UCB Regents Position per AT&T/BSDi/UCB - anything through 32V is public domain (see groklaw)

I think the USL lawyers feared that a jury might side with the Regents' position and therefore preferred to settle. Making the settlement secret was a clever idea and if it wasn't for Linux happening might have succeeded.

Even if the position taken by the USB Regents would not hold up in court, than anything through to and including 32V is still available under the BSD-style license granted by Caldera Inc. (see http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf). It was later established in court that Caldera did not hold copyrights to Unix, but that Novell did at that time. However, Caldera was the licensing agent for Novell and had broad rights to grant licenses (and collect license fees as applicable). Novell had the right to overrule Caldera if it felt such was necessary. It did so when Caldera revoked IBM's license. It did not overrule the "ancient unix" license, even though it was aware of it. Renouncing it 15+ years later probably won't stick.

Caldera (later renamed TSG) went bankrupt around 2011 and I'm not sure where the licensing agency went - perhaps it lapsed. Novell was acquired by Attachmate in 2010, which was acquired by British firm Micro Focus in 2014. Presumably they now hold the copyrights to the Unix source code. If so, perhaps they can be convinced to extend the BSD-style license to later versions, e.g. extend it up to SysV/R4.

Note I'm not a lawyer and just expressing opinion.

Paul

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Arthur Krewat]

Web server IP comes back as Russia.

On 3/2/2017 1:50 AM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017, at 17:22, Jason Stevens wrote:
>> Try this Google query
>>
>> site:vetusware.com <http://vetusware.com> "source code"
>>
>> For even more amazement
>>
>> On March 2, 2017 2:01:34 AM GMT+08:00, Arthur Krewat 
>> <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
>>
>>     Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com <http://vetusware.com> ?
>>
>>
>>     Google it with:
>>
>>
>>     site:vetusware.com <http://vetusware.com> unix source
>>
>>
>>     Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>
> A copy of the Cisco IOS code leak? That'll get them in some trouble...
>
> --
>   Cory Smelosky
>   b4 at gewt.net
>
>

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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Cory Smelosky]

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017, at 17:22, Jason Stevens wrote:

> Try this Google query

> 

>  site:vetusware.com "source code"

> 

>  For even more amazement

> 

> On March 2, 2017 2:01:34 AM GMT+08:00, Arthur Krewat
> <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
>> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
>> 

>> 
>> 

>> Google it with:
>> 

>> 
>> 

>> site:vetusware.com unix source
>> 

>> 
>> 

>> Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
>> 

> 

> --

>  Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.


A copy of the Cisco IOS code leak? That'll get them in some trouble...



--

  Cory Smelosky

  b4 at gewt.net




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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Jason Stevens]

Try this Google query

site:vetusware.com "source code"

For even more amazement

On March 2, 2017 2:01:34 AM GMT+08:00, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
>Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
>
>Google it with:
>
>site:vetusware.com unix source
>
>Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 1:28 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> Below
>
> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
>>
>>> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
>>> distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
>>> least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.
>>
>>
>> Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)
>
>
>
> Not a lawyer and don't play one TV or anywhere else....
>
>
> Some thoughts...
>
> 1.) UCB Regents Position per AT&T/BSDi/UCB - anything through 32V is public
> domain (see groklaw)
> 2.) All of Sun & IBM, bought out source licenses from AT&T with rights to do
> anything.... IBM is based on the SVR3 license, Sun on SVR4
> 3.) IBM's license is the basis for the OSF/1 license
> 4.) HP independently eventually gets is own bought out license, but I'm not
> sure what it's based [need to google the old UNIGRAM/X or the like]
> 5.) Sun takes SVR4 in and starts to add "Solaris features" to it (not going
> to argue percentages here for the moment).
> 6.) Sun open sources this code base...
>
> Now some questions....
>
> From the above, one could argue that set of code included in Solaris from
> the SysV linage was made public by step 6.
>
> I have seen argument that anything through SVR3 is public because of the
> actions of IBM, HP, and SUN when the code was bought out; but I have not
> seen a definitive action like step 6 that infer all of SVR3 was public.

I would be skeptical of that assertion. Copyright law doesn't allow
one to gain rights for earlier versions of a work they got rights for,
except to the extent that the earlier work is wholly included in the
later work.

Warner

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Clem Cole]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1592 bytes --]

Below

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 2:29 PM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
>
> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
>> distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
>> least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.
>>
>
> Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)



​Not a lawyer and don't play one TV or anywhere else....


Some thoughts...

1.) UCB Regents Position per AT&T/BSDi/UCB - anything through 32V is public
domain (see groklaw)
2.) All of Sun & IBM, bought out source licenses from AT&T with rights to
do anything.... IBM is based on the SVR3 license, Sun on SVR4
3.) IBM's license is the basis for the OSF/1 license
4.) HP independently eventually gets is own bought out license, but I'm not
sure what it's based [need to google the old UNIGRAM/X or the like]
5.) Sun takes SVR4 in and starts to add "Solaris features" to it (not going
to argue percentages here for the moment).
6.) Sun open sources this code base...

Now some questions....

From the above, one could argue that set of code included in Solaris from
the SysV linage was made public by step 6.

I have seen argument that anything through SVR3 is public because of the
actions of IBM, HP, and SUN when the code was bought out; but I have not
seen a definitive action like step 6 that infer all of SVR3 was public.
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Joerg Schilling]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1510 bytes --]

Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:

> > Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)
>
> I sometimes wonder how the legality of that worked (a recent complaint
> someone made about BSD drivers being incorporated into Linux got me
> thinking about it again) - surely there are big chunks of the
> opensolaris code that are not *very much* changed from the original
> System V code they're based on. Under what theory, then, was Sun the
> copyright holder and therefore able to release it under the CDDL?

Files that have been written by Sun or AT&T are published under the CDDL.

Files from BSD (and not imported from Sun to BSD) did keep their BSD 
license.... 

Note that the whole license analysys did take aprox. 5 years.

Example:

./cmd/csh/sh.dir.c  
/*
 * Copyright 2005 Sun Microsystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
 * Use is subject to license terms.
 */

/*      Copyright (c) 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 AT&T     */
/*        All Rights Reserved   */

/*
 * Copyright (c) 1980 Regents of the University of California.
 * All rights reserved.  The Berkeley Software License Agreement
 * specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
 */

#pragma ident   "%Z%%M% %I%     %E% SMI"
...


Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Warner Losh]

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Random832 <random832 at fastmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 1, 2017, at 14:29, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
>>
>> > My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
>> > distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
>> > least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.
>>
>> Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)
>
> I sometimes wonder how the legality of that worked (a recent complaint
> someone made about BSD drivers being incorporated into Linux got me
> thinking about it again) - surely there are big chunks of the
> opensolaris code that are not *very much* changed from the original
> System V code they're based on. Under what theory, then, was Sun the
> copyright holder and therefore able to release it under the CDDL?

Their paid-up perpetual license that granted them the right to do that?

Warner

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Random832]

On Wed, Mar 1, 2017, at 14:29, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
> 
> > My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
> > distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
> > least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.
> 
> Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)

I sometimes wonder how the legality of that worked (a recent complaint
someone made about BSD drivers being incorporated into Linux got me
thinking about it again) - surely there are big chunks of the
opensolaris code that are not *very much* changed from the original
System V code they're based on. Under what theory, then, was Sun the
copyright holder and therefore able to release it under the CDDL?

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Henry Bent]

Sure, I was referring to the AT&T source / porting bases.

That being said, I have seen numerous versions of Solaris source in the
wild.

-Henry

On 1 March 2017 at 14:29, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
>
> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
>> distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
>> least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.
>>
>
> Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)
>
> -uso.
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:

> My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
> distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
> least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.

Well, that's probably 95% true...the other 5% is Solaris. ;)

-uso.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Henry Bent]

My understanding is that System V source of any sort is not legal to
distribute.  I believe that source exists and has been archived for at
least some variants of SVR1, SVR2, SVR3, and SVR4.

-Henry

On 1 March 2017 at 14:18, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:

> The site is rife with warez, I understand that, I was wondering about the
> "legality" of distributing that source code, and if legal, if it had been
> archived somewhere else already.
>
>
>
>
> On 3/1/2017 1:27 PM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
>>
>> They decide, arbitrarily and with no real legal basis, that "if something
>>> is older than x arbitrary date, it must be OK to distribute," or "if
>>> something is for an operating system that no one really uses, it must be OK
>>> to distribute."  Why they do not get shut down is a mystery to me. I
>>> believe the concept started with old games for DOS and has spread to
>>> include operating systems and other software.
>>>
>>
>> I openly used a profane word referring to bovine excrement as my opinion
>> of this concept of "abandonware".
>>
>> It's just warez, plain and simple.
>>
>> -uso.
>>
>>
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Arthur Krewat]

The site is rife with warez, I understand that, I was wondering about 
the "legality" of distributing that source code, and if legal, if it had 
been archived somewhere else already.



On 3/1/2017 1:27 PM, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:
>
>> They decide, arbitrarily and with no real legal basis, that "if 
>> something is older than x arbitrary date, it must be OK to 
>> distribute," or "if something is for an operating system that no one 
>> really uses, it must be OK to distribute."  Why they do not get shut 
>> down is a mystery to me. I believe the concept started with old games 
>> for DOS and has spread to include operating systems and other software.
>
> I openly used a profane word referring to bovine excrement as my 
> opinion of this concept of "abandonware".
>
> It's just warez, plain and simple.
>
> -uso.
>

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Steve Nickolas]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Henry Bent wrote:

> They decide, arbitrarily and with no real legal basis, that "if 
> something is older than x arbitrary date, it must be OK to distribute," 
> or "if something is for an operating system that no one really uses, it 
> must be OK to distribute."  Why they do not get shut down is a mystery 
> to me.  I believe the concept started with old games for DOS and has 
> spread to include operating systems and other software.

I openly used a profane word referring to bovine excrement as my opinion 
of this concept of "abandonware".

It's just warez, plain and simple.

-uso.

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Henry Bent]

This appears to be one of a number of sites that have decided to flaunt the
law.  They decide, arbitrarily and with no real legal basis, that "if
something is older than x arbitrary date, it must be OK to distribute," or
"if something is for an operating system that no one really uses, it must
be OK to distribute."  Why they do not get shut down is a mystery to me.  I
believe the concept started with old games for DOS and has spread to
include operating systems and other software.

-Henry

On 1 March 2017 at 13:01, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:

> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
>
> Google it with:
>
> site:vetusware.com unix source
>
> Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
>
>
>
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[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Cory Smelosky]

ON phone so can't check but if it's SysV, then yes.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Mar 1, 2017, at 10:01, Arthur Krewat <krewat at kilonet.net> wrote:
> 
> Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?
> 
> Google it with:
> 
> site:vetusware.com unix source
> 
> Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?
> 
> 

[TUHS] Source code abundance?

[Arthur Krewat]

Anyone ever looked at vetusware.com ?

Google it with:

site:vetusware.com unix source

Is all of this stuff archived somewhere else?