Other people's copyrights will prevent Unix source release

Other people's copyrights will prevent Unix source release

As I understand it, no court can order the opening of "modern" Unix sources. There are too many copyright owners.

The early Unices were purely Bell Labs code, and had a pure AT&T copyright. That made them easy to open: there was only one copyright holder. Even when Berkeley and other university code began to be included, the contributions (predating both the terms Free Software and Open Source) were clearly licenced under FS/OS terms.

But modern Unices include software from all sorts of people. A check through AIX install logs shows the "base operating system" (largely System V stuff) to have about ten different copyight holders. There are a lot more for other parts of AIX. I'm assuming that SCO's Unices (and base System V) are in a similar position.

Only two of these copyright holders are party to the current lawsuits: many of these will have licensed their code only on payment. Many of them will still consider their software to be valuable.

The court cannot take from SCO what isn't SCO's to confiscate. So in order to release modern Unix as open source, someone is going to have to work through the entire source tree, cut out stuff that isn't owned by SCO (or comes from BSD, X, or other places that have already released their contributions), and release what's left, as an uncompiling mess. Worse, every one who used it would have to be sure that every last bit of third-party code had gone, or face similar lawsuits.

And if someone takes Unix code, in good faith, incorporates it into part of GNU/Linux, then one of these copyright holders discovers that actually, that was their code, thankyou very much, we'll be right back where we are now.

We can't get Unix open-sourced. And really, we don't even want Unix open-sourced.

James.