On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote:
> The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded licence
> to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own the
> copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by a
> judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source.
This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could
to make it unambiguous what I meant.
A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is
NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a
court of law).
Not so fast. What the court said was that Novell did not transfer the copyrights to Caldera *using a specific legal instrument at a specific time*. There is no judicial opinion saying either that Novell did, or Novell did not, transfer the copyright on some other occasion. So the Caldera license is clouded but not ipso facto void. (See .sig below) Remember also that in litigation a fact is any point on which both (or all) sides agree, and its factuality by ordinary standards is irrelevant.