​below.​

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:09 AM, <cowan at ccil.org> wrote:

> It might be possible to get the vanilla-from-AT&T System V Releases 1-3
> freely licensed, though Novell is presumably still making money from AIX,
> which descends from SVR3.
>
Hmm ..I thought all of the majors >>except<< for DEC​ bought out their
licenses at some point.   I admit I've forgotten the specifics, but  that
is my recollection.




> SVR4 has proprietary Microsoft (Xenix) and
> SunOS (Oracle) code in it, plus being the ancestor of still-current HP/UX.
>
​HP/UX is an SVR3 & OSF/1 ancester.   Solaris is SVR4.  In fact it was the
SVR4 license and deal between Sun and AT&T)​ that forced the whole OSF
creation.  One of the "principles" of the OSF was "Fair and Stable" license
terms.

Which begs a question - since Solaris was SVR4 based and was made freely
available via OpenSolaris et al, does that not make SVR4 open?   I'm not a
lawyer (nor play one on TV), but it does seem like that sets some sort of
precedent.



> Scrubbing proprietary third-party code to make an open-source release
> of any of these ancient versions, as had to be done for Solaris (and Java),
>
​Interesting - how did they "scrub" SVR4 from it?   The whole idea was to
take SVR4 and "enhance it" using the SVR4 API's.  ​



> is almost certainly too much work for anyone to want to undertake today.
>
​Agreed, unless there is a clear statement from the owners, it's going to
be hard; which is a shame from a historical stand point, but I agree.
C
​lem​
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