Dear Warner, Armijn and Jillayne:

On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 1:20 AM Warner Losh <imp@...> wrote:

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...

So with a bit of digging in CVS (yeah!) ... on only one file
(gmatch.c), it looks like the original commit had this caldera license
header alright and that must have been added when porting from the 7th
edition, per the "Derived from /usr/src/cmd/sh/expand.c, Unix 7th
Edition:" comment in that file.
https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/expand.c
did not have such notice.

So I would surmise that Gunnar Ritter (Heirloom's original creator)
took the original 7th edition code from TUHS and used the
TUHS-provided Caldera notice (such as at
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/Caldera-license.txt ) to add as
a comment in the code. The timeline of various events supports this
analysis.

Sven Mascheck <mascheck@...> has an extensive Shell history at
https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/#heirloom including a Heirloom
shell commit log that matches the CVS's log at
https://sourceforge.net/projects/heirloom/

With all that said, the license text that we discuss here and as seen
in gmatch.c is IMHO closest to a plain BSD-4-Clause with minor
variations (e.g. scope of source and documentation vs. only source in
BSD-4-Clause) so if the intro blurb seen in the SPDX Caldera text is
not material, then may be the body text itself could be just a minor
variant of the BSD-4-Clause.

Someone could bug Gunnar Ritter at <gunnarr@...> of course to get
confirmation.

--
Cordially
Philippe Ombredanne

+1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne@...
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