> When the partnership ended, both sides ended up with unlimited rights, while copyrights were (mostly) left separate.

That sounds interesting; do you happen to know any details of how the agreement worked/first-party statements about this?

> 4.4BSD-Lite2 is open source approved by USL in the settlement of their lawsuit against BSDi. NetBSD and FreeBSD rebased upon Lite2 to close all legal questions. Thus, they and all their derivatives (the foci being OpenBSD, MirBSD, and the most progressive of them — DragonFlyBSD) are entirely, irrevocably under the BSD license.

Sure, and I think that’s wonderful. But some of them re-imported Ancient UNIX code later, explicitly licensed in part under the Caldera license. For example, FreeBSD has usr.bin/diff/diffreg.c (https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/stable/12/usr.bin/diff/diffreg.c?revision=315051&view=markup) that has a Caldera license header because it’s derived from V7 code (they apparently got that via OpenBSD, seeing the history in OpenBSD, https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/diff/diffreg.c). It’s not like you can just entirely pretend the problem is gone, but it’s *mostly* gone in BSDs after 4.4-Lite2. Of course, that also means they’re (from a code genealogy perspective) basically not really UNIX anymore, though that’s just semantics.

> I would love to see the older Unix versions freed, which would make it legal to release older vendor branches, such as Ultrix, OSF/1, Sprite, and the amazing Domain/OS. The news would renew interest in software preservation — appropriate on Unix’s 50th anniversary. TUHS & the BSDs absolutely should ask Micro Focus to relicense (or assign copyright to a preservation society!) and give them some sort of reward (and goodwill, of course) for doing so.

They also don’t want to hear it. Micro Focus goes radio silent whenever someone contacts them about it, be it sales or be it legal. TUHS seems equally disinterested in re-opening the licensing can since they’re just happy nobody is actively going after them and the question is mostly moot in the USA. As much as I’d love to see a release (ideally BSD-licensed) of more stuff like PWB, System III… Hell, even SVR4 is 20 years old now, which is the same age Ancient UNIX had when the Caldera license happened. But there’s absolutely no interest of any of the major parties involved. I suspect the 50th birthday of UNIX will be just as uneventful as all the others preceding it, unfortunately.

Let me explain:

Sun was USL (AT&T)’s main partner in creating SVr4, with SunOS 5.0 as the result, and SunOS 4.1 as an intermediate.
When the partnership ended, both sides ended up with unlimited rights, while copyrights were (mostly) left separate.
Thus, Sun always had the right to open source SVr4, but no earlier Unix. Once this was done at SunOS 5.10 (as OpenSolaris), the whole world gained perpetual rights, within the limits of the Mozilla license that Sun chose. When Oracle decided to end open source releases (for nearly all of ~30 prominent Sun projects), the community forked them under new names. OpenSolaris became Illumos, Hudson became Jenkins, etc. Hence SVr4, with only minor changes, is still being maintained today, as open source.

4.4BSD-Lite2 is open source approved by USL in the settlement of their lawsuit against BSDi. NetBSD and FreeBSD rebased upon Lite2 to close all legal questions. Thus, they and all their derivatives (the foci being OpenBSD, MirBSD, and the most progressive of them — DragonFlyBSD) are entirely, irrevocably under the BSD license. BSDi codebase is special in only 2 ways: it’s _less_ free, being a mainly paid product, and is dead (unlike the other main forks of 386BSD).

I would love to see the older Unix versions freed, which would make it legal to release older vendor branches, such as Ultrix, OSF/1, Sprite, and the amazing Domain/OS. The news would renew interest in software preservation — appropriate on Unix’s 50th anniversary. TUHS & the BSDs absolutely should ask Micro Focus to relicense (or assign copyright to a preservation society!) and give them some sort of reward (and goodwill, of course) for doing so.
Thank you for suggesting it!

But does that really matter here? OpenSolaris is open sourced (albeit under a license I’m not really happy with). What happened after that seems out of scope for the article.

Did anyone save the original OpenSolaris code from 2005? I know it required the Sun C Compiler that I’ve never had, so I never had any interest in it.

OpenSolaris forked by the illumos project.
See here: https://www.illumos.org
Git repository: https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate
First commit:
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/commit/7c478bd95313f5f23a4c958a745db2134aa03244
:OpenSolaris Launch – Jun 14 2005

I’m not the author, nor a lawyer… but I suspect it’s in question as it’s never been legally challenged, unlike BSD/OS.

Second question. Is there a OpenSolaris GIT/CVS from the 2005 till 2010 (when Oracle closed it again) ?