Can Novell release Unix as free software?

Posted Apr 2, 2010 8:54 UTC (Fri) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: Can Novell release Unix as free software? by vonbrand
Parent article: SCO loses again

vonbrand wrote:

So they originally owned all copyrights to Unix (but a lot of Unix wasn't copyrighted, and another large portion belonged to others).

That's sort-of inconsistent. AT&T originally owned all copyrights to the early Unixes, but by the time Novell got involved, as you say, a large part of Unix (by then) belonged to others. So that large part couldn't have belonged to Novell.

They must have had rights to redistribute (for example, the BSD license), but those rights may have been limited (there may have been confidentiality clauses). It's also probable that those rights passed to SCO (under section III of Schedule 1.1(a)): the question just hasn't arisen under the current lawsuits.

Now the jury has stated that the copyrights belonged to Novell all along, so Novell is certainly in position to open source them.

That doesn't follow, either. It's quite possible to own something but be contractually limited as to what you can do with it. The APA is a contract, and the section I pointed to certainly seems to place some limits on what Novell can do with Unix.

Like a lot of the rest of that contract, it's less than clear!

Can Novell release Unix as free software?

Posted Apr 2, 2010 17:04 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

actually, when Unix was initially written the law was not automatic copyrights to anything you wrote, you had to take specific actions to copyright things. For much of the Unix codebase those actions were not taken, and so it was not under copyright, by AT&T or anyone else.

Then there was the Berkley lawsuit, which showed that large portions of the Unix codebase was under copyright by Berkley, not by AT&T.

the situation of who owned what is _far_ from being clear, even before AT&T sold it.