Comment by charcircuit
8 days ago
Did they get a license from Novell for this or is this as illegal as many of the other emulator sites with copyrighted software on them? Considering the page doesn't mention it, I'm leaning towards it being copyright infringement.
In 2002, Caldera licensed Research Unix <= 7th edition and 32-bit 32V Unix under a BSD-style license.
Gotta stick the "This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc." notice on it though.
This copy of Unix v4 came from AT&T and not one of the freely licensed ones Caldera released. Caldera may own the rights now for this unearthed copy, but I am not aware that they have provided licenses for this new release.
If your argument is that Caldera might not actually have the rights to UNIX in the first place to grant the license, that's fair.
But the license they provided (http://www.lemis.com/grog/UNIX/ancient-source-all.pdf) explicitly names versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of UNIX for the 16-bit PDP-11. Yes, these versions originated at AT&T (Bell Labs) but are distinct legally from SysIII and SysV UNIX, also from AT&T, which are explicitly not covered by the Caldera license.
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Personal financial stake in this, or do you regularly police the use of ancient software?
>Personal financial stake in this
In the sense that the company I work for would be financially harmed if copyright infringement of software was freely allowed. I benefit from the ability of people being able to sell rights to use software.
It's one thing to digitize and archive ancient software, it's another thing to allow people to freely use it without acquiring the proper license for it.
I’m normally one defending copyright on this forum. But dude, this software is half a century old. Nobody is buying or selling this software. Nobody’s business or livelihood is threatened by this.
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The people who preserve vintage software typically respect boundaries in order to avoid cases where the copyright holder would be financially harmed. It is not a perfect guarantee, but it is a reasonable one.
Hardline stances usually cause more harm than good anyhow. I remember collecting Apple II gear in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The people saying that any form of copyright infringement was bad were either ignored or flamed since a lot of people just looked at their collection of software from the late 1970's and early 1980's and said, "we're at risk of losing this if we don't make it available, and the copyright holders won't lose anything if we do make it available." Which wasn't strictly true since there were some software developers who created software in the early 1990's who were still selling it. Unfortunately their absolutist attitude did not earn them many allies, so it became a lost cause.
I mean if you are assigning points I’d actually say the former is worse than the latter.
What do you think about GOG?
It's good to have competition against Steam.
GOG is perfectly legal.
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