From: Mirian Crzig Lennox <lennox@alcita.com>
To: UNIX Heritage Society <pups@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au>
Subject: Re: Sun release source code for Solaris 8
References: <20000127110321.I53307@freebie.lemis.com> <m3aels1g6u.fsf@shelbyville.oai.com> <20000127145736.Q53307@freebie.lemis.com>
Original-Sender: lennox@alcita.com
Organization: Alcita Technologies, Inc.
Date: 27 Jan 2000 11:55:30 -0500
In-Reply-To: Greg Lehey's message of "Thu, 27 Jan 2000 14:57:36 +1030"
Message-ID: <m3ln5b5u9p.fsf@shelbyville.oai.com>
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Sender: owner-pups@minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au
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Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> writes:
> > After looking at the site, it seems as though Sun is trying to
> > prevent licence holders from sharing code with other licence
> > holders.
> 
> I'm not 100% sure what they mean here.  Nobody can stop you
> distributing software you wrote as long as it doesn't contain
> proprietary Sun code.  You could do that with diffs.

Can I really?  Any diffs are necessarily going to contain some of the
original proprietary code.  It depends on how aggressive Sun's lawyers
are going to be about preventing any co-operative development of
Solaris which is not mediated by Sun.  From their website, it seems
that Sun wants to be firmly in control of that process.

This is in contrast to the Ancient UNIX licence, where it's my
impression that SCO really doesn't care what you do with UNIX so long
as you don't share code with unlicensed people.

> > If this is true, it would certainly make the Solaris licence less
> > desirable to hobbyists than the ancient UNIX licence, unfortunately.
> 
> I think it is anyway.  For hobby purposes, I'd much rather use either
> 4.4BSD (for modern usage) or one of the old UNIXes.

For practical purposes I agree, although I'm intrigued enough by the
extremely modular design of Solaris to think it might be fun to spend
some time playing with.

-- 
Mirian Crzig Lennox                                Systems Anarchist
              Invest in America -- buy a Congressman!