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Re: Caldera license question

Warner Losh
 



On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 9:39 AM J Lovejoy <opensource@...> wrote:
Hi all,

I came across a "variant" of the Caldera license. Here is what we have on SPDX: https://spdx.org/licenses/Caldera.html

But this project - http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html has this license but it omits the first paragraph and next few lines. That part alone isn't a full match otherwise. (see attached)

I'm wondering if we should made that first part optional as it does seem to be very specific code, as listed.

The Heirloom Bourne Shell project is used in Fedora, so that's how it came up. I don't know if it's used elsewhere or if this variant of the license, but any info on that would be helpful!

I wonder why they are using the Caldera license?

Did they harvest these files from the 7th Edition of Unix, or did Sun license these and Caldera made them put this license on things? The version 7 /bin/sh was included in the grant of the original license, and the System V version was excluded which is what the OpenSolaris one is based on if it came from Sun's repo... But I've not done the software archaeology to know from whence this project started their sources....

Though thinking about it, it likely doesn't matter for our purposes...  I think having a variant is fine as long as the consensus legal opinion of this team is that the differences don't change anything. The first few paragraphs could only apply to the ancient unix sources and nothing else that wants to use this license.

Followup question though: Once the first few lines are removed, is the license the same as one of the BSD and/or MIT variants?

Warner
 
Thanks,
Jilayne

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