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Do You Know UNIX Secrets?
ESR writes "You can help stop the SCO attack on IBM and the Linux community.
I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally
nullified.
I want to know if you have ever had read access to proprietary Unix
source code (not just binaries and documentation) under circumstances
where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever
non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced. To help out, see my No Secrets page."
Back in the mid '80's, when I was working for U S WEST, the Amdahl machine I and a bunch of other engineers had logins on had the /src files all open (read only).
I used my access to the source of that version of UNIX (UTS) source a lot to help me with the Xenix system I was running at home.
Thing is, my racall of this is flakey enough that I cannot provide actual dates that the source on the "PN1" machine was open (about a one year window, after we moved from an IBM to an Amdahl mainframe, probably around 1985-86).
I don't think that's good enough, though, to have any effect on the SCO v IBM case.
(I wonder if the fact that U S WEST used to be a part of the Bell System - I went to U S WEST from Bell Labs, Holmdel - possibly made us feel a "part of the UNIX family" so we didn't seem to be as strict about holding the source inviolate. I dunno.)
The University of Southern California had a project in 1981-1982 to port UNIX from a VAX 780 to the Data General MV8000 (from "The Soul of a New Machine") using about 20 grad students. To my knowledge, none of the students (including me) had to sign anything to work on the project, and we certainly had access to the full source. One of the other guys was Fred Cohen, who has been widely credited with coining the term " computer virus".
And Solaris isn't System V Release 4?! Gee...I guess Sun have been lying to me :-p
SunOS Release 5.7 [UNIX(R) System V Release 4.0]
The first line line of text that appears when the kernel loads. So you're right.
I was a in the platinum beta test program for Solaris at the time, and the question of it being made open source came up when I was visiting. Sun was actually interested in making all of the Solaris source available to NDA-signing clients, but found themselves unable to do so for legal reasons.
Over the years, over 100 subcontractors, some of which no longer exist as companies, were involved in writing the code that makes up Solaris. It was impossible for Sun to get the okay from all those subcontractors to make those pieces of the source available to clients outside of Sun, and I suspect it quickly became a logistical nightmare of tracking which pieces of code were subject to which legal agreements with subcontractors, who had the IP rights of any subcontractors that were defunct, and so on.
If you think that ESR is "finally" getting things in gear, then you haven't seen his OSI Position Paper. The initial draft of this was released 4 days after the initial lawsuit.
Those of you who have read it awhile back may want to look again. A fair amount has changed in the past week or so.
the no
SunOS (later the WIndowed version was called Solaris 1.x) up until 4.x was BSD 4.3 system...it was NOT a "free BSD" derivative, whatever you mean.
Solaris 2.x+ is very much System V Release 4. Sun were a member of that collective and Solaris still retains that structure.
You might want to check your facts.
-psy