4 ms·

Got millions?

• imoverclocked 3y ago
  Nope. Maybe it could be a charitable donation though?
  • thombat 3y ago
    Generally the problem for a company is being entirely sure that the OS codebase is theirs to donate. Are there any third party components, if so were they correctly classified so that now they'll be filtered out of the code dump? (And was that classification updated in the obsolete source if subsequent deals affected it?) Probably so, but if you're wrong then it will likely cost. So your legal dept will advise that the safest and cheapest option is not to release it. (I was at Symbian when much of that was open sourced: a paralysingly large effort that still left a lot of critical components closed)
    • imoverclocked 3y ago
      3rd party dependencies are a good point. Though we are talking about a 35 year old OS whose last incremental update was 16 years ago and last major release about 25 years ago. We are also talking about a non-profit inheriting the codebase. Seems like the lawyers could probably figure something out given these constraints. Irix did a lot of things in-house and the value of the OS is not generally in commonly available components. I suspect that any 16-25 year-old 3rd-party components that are of any value have modern equivalents which are open-source and probably better in most ways. I would think there is a way of putting the burden of sorting through these issues onto the non-profit receiving the rights much as the burden was passed to HP through an acquisition in the first place.
      • avidphantasm 3y ago
        None of this will deter a patent or license troll from suing…
      • SMP-UX 3y ago
        HPE bought Rackable for NUMALink tech, moreorless. I'd have less faith in corporations to do the right thing. As an Indian, I get nothing but slave treatment even in America because I'm expected to work for less and harder than my white counterparts.