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Caldera releases original unices under BSD license
q[alex] writes "Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the "Ancient" Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a "BSD-style" license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of PDP-11s! It'd almost match my 8086! FP
If microsoft put any of their rotten OSs out in source code, GPL or not, I still would not use it to wipe my butt.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
SCO Open Server is 10x worse then Unixware. Don't even get me started :).
:).
A few notes:
* No ELF shared libraries (COFF)
* No loadable kernel modules (manually re-link the kernel for every new driver).
* No kmalloc function for many kernel buffers; if you over-run a buffer you have to change the kernel header files, re-link and pray you don't over-run them again.
* Many functions that should be in shared libraries are hacked to hell; for instance some NFS functions for "ls" are in ls itself rather then libc. GNU ls does not work with NFS directories on Open Server because of this.
* They just implemented a dhcp client in Open Server about a year ago.
[Necessary MS jibe] But hey, what can you expect from somthing that used to be a Microsoft product [Xenix].
From what I could tell most of the SCO messiness came from a hacked merger of System V and System III into Open Server 5. What kills me about OpenServer is that it is STILL heavily used by the telco industry. A former company that I worked with looked at Linux but stuck with SCO Open Server because of "support" concerns.
To the point:
I'm just waiting for Caldera to Open-Source Open Server so that the whole computing industry can get a good laugh and Computer Science departments can gain a valuable teching tool as to what *NOT* to do in your OS
I hate to say it, but I would prefer to be an MSCE then to ever touch Open Server again. Open Server is a complete shame to the name UNIX.
I invite any Open Server fans out there to put in thier arguments for it -- I would love to hear anything that anyone has positive to say about it. Moreover, if anyone has a UNIX derivative that is *worse* then Open Server and is still sold today I would also love to hear about it. Frankly I don't think that's possible.
Because of the Linus bottleneck in the Linux kernel development process, how will any of this code end up in the Linux project and up directly benifiting the OpenSource community?
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