Cool! This is a fine example of the kind of thing I could just lose myself in, and why I want to retire before I’m too old to care so I can actually play with some of this shit in an unrestricted way before I shuffle off this mortal coil :)
Ever since I got Xenix running on Qemu over 10 years ago, I’ve always been amazed at how just popular the abandoned SYSV is among hackers.
Although having it in a more accessible form of networking is always fun, but like any 386 based OS from the early 1990’s it’ll feel super limited for anyone used to anything modern.
I’ve always been amazed at how just popular the abandoned SYSV is among hackers.
Now if we could actually shake Novell/Micro Focus down for an open source release of System III and V under a BSD license like Caldera tried with Ancient UNIX, that’d be fantastic.
Hmm, what’s the legal status of Xenix nowadays? It’s (c) SCO and as far as I know they were historically very averse to people running their stuff without paying a lot.
What I can tell you for sure is that it’s closed source and not sold anymore.
At a cursory glance, Xenix was started by Microsoft as a V7 port, and then SCO bought either the copyright or more or less all relevant rights off Microsoft; I’m not sure if it was SCO or Microsoft that did the System V port, presumably it was SCO. Wikipedia is full of unsourced claims on the Xenix page, so I’m just going off what I know for sure.
Depending on the details of the Xenix sale to SCO, Microsoft may still have rights to license old versions of Xenix, possibly open-sourcing them. SCO itself went bankrupt and the remains got bought during the bankruptcy by UnXis (called Xinuos today), so most likely, they’d be your point of contact, given that apparently they bought the Xenix part, too.
Xinuos seems to be a bit more relaxed about their software. Xinuos OpenServer 10 no longer employs any kind of copy protection/DRM; the updated versions of OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7 definitely still do, however. In all likelihood, however, you’d be lucky to even get so much as a response if you approach them about Xenix. That’s probably a can of worms their lawyers don’t want to open.
Coherent anyone? :)
There are actual guides on virtualizing Coherent these days, too.
Cool! This is a fine example of the kind of thing I could just lose myself in, and why I want to retire before I’m too old to care so I can actually play with some of this shit in an unrestricted way before I shuffle off this mortal coil :)
Ever since I got Xenix running on Qemu over 10 years ago, I’ve always been amazed at how just popular the abandoned SYSV is among hackers.
Although having it in a more accessible form of networking is always fun, but like any 386 based OS from the early 1990’s it’ll feel super limited for anyone used to anything modern.
Now if we could actually shake Novell/Micro Focus down for an open source release of System III and V under a BSD license like Caldera tried with Ancient UNIX, that’d be fantastic.
Hmm, what’s the legal status of Xenix nowadays? It’s (c) SCO and as far as I know they were historically very averse to people running their stuff without paying a lot.
What I can tell you for sure is that it’s closed source and not sold anymore.
At a cursory glance, Xenix was started by Microsoft as a V7 port, and then SCO bought either the copyright or more or less all relevant rights off Microsoft; I’m not sure if it was SCO or Microsoft that did the System V port, presumably it was SCO. Wikipedia is full of unsourced claims on the Xenix page, so I’m just going off what I know for sure.
Depending on the details of the Xenix sale to SCO, Microsoft may still have rights to license old versions of Xenix, possibly open-sourcing them. SCO itself went bankrupt and the remains got bought during the bankruptcy by UnXis (called Xinuos today), so most likely, they’d be your point of contact, given that apparently they bought the Xenix part, too.
Xinuos seems to be a bit more relaxed about their software. Xinuos OpenServer 10 no longer employs any kind of copy protection/DRM; the updated versions of OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7 definitely still do, however. In all likelihood, however, you’d be lucky to even get so much as a response if you approach them about Xenix. That’s probably a can of worms their lawyers don’t want to open.