Re: [TUHS] SunOS code?

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 02:04:10PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 1:41 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> wrote:
> 
> >     > and finding a proper distribution tape to officially release.
> >
> > Why do we need that? Can't they say 'any and all versions of SunOS', and
> > that
> > term ('SunOS') is sufficiently well defined in real-world documents (e.g.
> > Sun
> > licenses) that that should be 'good enough'.
> >
> > It sounds like the _actual code_ is reasonably available, we wouldn't need
> > Oracle to go looking around for it, would we?
> >
> 
> The trouble, as I was given to understand when I worked at Solbourne, was
> that SunOS wasn't just AT&T + BSD 4.2 +  4.3 + awesome hacking at SMI.
> There were a number of third party bits and pieces in there that could not
> be relicensed, even 28 years ago when things were fresh. 

So I've been down this path, it was STREAMS and RFS, and maybe a couple
of drivers.  I pulled all that crud out, put back the BSD tty code,
and I had a SunOS we could have given away.  It was back when I was
writing this:

http://mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/freeos.pdf

and I needed to be able to show that what I was asking for was possible.

> A quick grep of something that fell off an http server suggests that the
> number of these is quite limited. However, the files they are on have no
> other license, even though latter-day versions are available of hack, hunt,
> indent and pax are available (though to be fair, the latter two do give
> permission explicitly, and a good case can be made for hunt). 

So you are including userland.  I'm not sure you need to.  Yeah, there was
some unicode work done there but quite frankly, I'd just have 

	/usr/gnu/bin
	/usr/bsd/bin
	/usr/sun/bin

and dump anything questionable in sun/bin.  It's the kernel that was the
most interesting, next would be the run time loader and shared libraries.
/usr/bin wasn't that exciting, the BSD purists might want that but I gotta
believe that BSD has caught up to Sun in 25 years (right???).