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Comment by LukeShu

8 days ago

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.

    • > 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.

      Yeah, everyone knows Unix is owned by SCO, just like C++, Linux, and the look on your face, which is priceless.

      (So help me, SCO claimed to own C++ at one point:

      https://lwn.net/Articles/39227/

      > C++ is one of the properties that SCO owns today and we frequently are approached by customers who wish to license C++ from us and we do charge for that. Those arrangements are done on a case-by-case basis with each customer and are not disclosed publicly. C++ licensing is currently part of SCO's SCOsource licensing program.

      Maybe they claimed to own an implementation of C++ but it would be typical of them to claim to own the moon and sun and be sublicensing the stars to God.)

    • Thank you for finding this.

      >Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice

      The archived tape doesn't have this, which contradicts the license. This makes me think the license may only be referring to a set of source code that they released with this license text already applied as opposed to what was recently archived.

      >Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice

      I don't see the copyright notice on that page. So at the very least that may need to be added.

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