| ▲ | charcircuit 9 hours ago |
| Did they get a license from Novell for this or is this as illegal as many of the other emulator sites with copyrighted software on them? Considering the page doesn't mention it, I'm leaning towards it being copyright infringement. |
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| ▲ | LukeShu 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In 2002, Caldera licensed Research Unix <= 7th edition and 32-bit 32V Unix under a BSD-style license. Gotta stick the "This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc." notice on it though. |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This copy of Unix v4 came from AT&T and not one of the freely licensed ones Caldera released. Caldera may own the rights now for this unearthed copy, but I am not aware that they have provided licenses for this new release. | | |
| ▲ | spijdar 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | If your argument is that Caldera might not actually have the rights to UNIX in the first place to grant the license, that's fair. But the license they provided (http://www.lemis.com/grog/UNIX/ancient-source-all.pdf) explicitly names versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of UNIX for the 16-bit PDP-11. Yes, these versions originated at AT&T (Bell Labs) but are distinct legally from SysIII and SysV UNIX, also from AT&T, which are explicitly not covered by the Caldera license. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thank you for finding this. >Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice The archived tape doesn't have this, which contradicts the license. This makes me think the license may only be referring to a set of source code that they released with this license text already applied as opposed to what was recently archived. >Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice I don't see the copyright notice on that page. So at the very least that may need to be added. | | |
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| ▲ | fortyseven 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Personal financial stake in this, or do you regularly police the use of ancient software? |
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| ▲ | charcircuit 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Personal financial stake in this In the sense that the company I work for would be financially harmed if copyright infringement of software was freely allowed. I benefit from the ability of people being able to sell rights to use software. It's one thing to digitize and archive ancient software, it's another thing to allow people to freely use it without acquiring the proper license for it. | | |
| ▲ | II2II 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The people who preserve vintage software typically respect boundaries in order to avoid cases where the copyright holder would be financially harmed. It is not a perfect guarantee, but it is a reasonable one. Hardline stances usually cause more harm than good anyhow. I remember collecting Apple II gear in the late 1990's and early 2000's. The people saying that any form of copyright infringement was bad were either ignored or flamed since a lot of people just looked at their collection of software from the late 1970's and early 1980's and said, "we're at risk of losing this if we don't make it available, and the copyright holders won't lose anything if we do make it available." Which wasn't strictly true since there were some software developers who created software in the early 1990's who were still selling it. Unfortunately their absolutist attitude did not earn them many allies, so it became a lost cause. | |
| ▲ | kube-system 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m normally one defending copyright on this forum. But dude, this software is half a century old. Nobody is buying or selling this software. Nobody’s business or livelihood is threatened by this. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Nobody is buying or selling this software. Nobody’s business or livelihood is threatened by this. Because the media was no longer in the rights holder's possession. This is a dangerous line of reasoning where someone can steal a copyrighted work and then be allowed to profit off of it because the artist has no way to do so. Being able to see a long lost UNIX version is interesting and I could imagine it being worth paying to see it or play with it similar to how people pay money to see things at a museum. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Dangerous line of reasoning??? Allowing time for an author to monetize a work is the legal rationale for copyright protection. There is no commercial value to this software. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Here is a hypothetical. You see someone on their iPad making a nice drawing. You then steal the iPad and then start making prints of that art and start selling them. To me the artist should be able to disallow such prints from being sold. But your line of reasoning says that since the artist is unable to make money from the print, then there is nothing wrong with someone else doing so as the artist isn't missing out on any profit since they have no way to sell prints. |
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| ▲ | LastTrain 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean if you are assigning points I’d actually say the former is worse than the latter. |
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| ▲ | publicdebates 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What do you think about GOG? |
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