Update: there’s a fork called heirloom-ng that is actually still somewhat maintained and contains some more changes and modernisations compared to the old version.
The Heirloom Project provides traditional implementations of standard Unix utilities. In many cases, they have been derived from original Unix material released as Open Source by Caldera and Sun.
Interfaces follow traditional practice; they remain generally compatible with System V, although extensions that have become common use over the course of time are sometimes provided. Most utilities are also included in a variant that aims at POSIX conformance.
On the interior, technologies for the twenty-first century such as the UTF-8 character encoding or OpenType fonts are supported.
↫ The Heirloom Project website
I had never heard of this before, but I like the approach they’re taking. This isn’t just taking System V tools and making them work on a modern UNIX-like system as-is; they’re also improving by them adding support for modern technologies, without actually changing their classic nature and the way old-fashioned users expect them to work. Sadly, the project seems to be dead, as the code hasn’t been altered since 2008. Perhaps someone new is willing to take up this project?
As it currently stands, the tools are available for Linux, Solaris, Open UNIX, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, but considering how long the code hasn’t been touched, I wonder if they still run and work on any of those systems today. They also come in various different versions which comply with different variants of the POSIX standard.
The heirloom utilities are still useful, still actively used, and show up in odd places. The copyright status is however unclear as the code was released by Caldera who apparently never had the rights to Unix. That’d make… Micro Focus the current copyright holder of the heirloom stuff – the COBOL people? Maybe? I can’t keep track.
“Traditional vi” is probably the most famous source release by Caldera, since the original vi was never open source. Keith Bostic wrote nvi as a replacement so that BSD could become free software, and it’s the ancestor of the vi implementations in all BSDs today.
A lot of heirloom seems to come from Solaris. Anything that can be traced to Solaris would be on quite solid footing.
The Caldera stuff is an interesting question but I think there is not really much grey. Heirloom is safe to use.
I would have to go back and read Groklaw to remember exactly what was produced in writing back then. I do remember that Novell argued that Caldera did not “own” the copyright and therefore could not enforce it. However Caldera DID have the right to license the software to others as an agent of Novell. Novell did not not have to approve these licenses although they were entitled to a share of the revenue. I would think that the license Caldera provided to hierloom would be valid under this agreement. Certainly operating under that understanding would be a reasonable defense. All this was argued in court already after all.
There is also the fact that Novell certainly acted in a way consistent with the copyright NOT being enforced against Open Source. In fact, I believe they released a letter explicitly indemnifying Linux users from copyright suits regarding System V. That would limit the ability to enforce any claim now in most legal jurisdictions I believe. IANAL of course.
In addition, Novell released their own branded Open Source licensed Linux as did Caldera. Amazingly Unixware is still for sale and still identified as a product of SCO ( Caldera ).
Finally, there is no commercial foundation for a suit. There is no money to defend and no money to go after. Even if the situation were grey (which I think it really is not), it would still be low risk.
The real blast from the past is that they are using CVS. Why not just use SCCS?
Seriously though, is this stuff really so “ancient”? I mean, isn’t it basically what you would find in Solaris even today? Illumos? Sure, the origins go way back but FreeBSD (and I guess now Chimera Linux) trace their userland back almost as far (pre-Linux and pre-GNU anyway).
It is cool that it can be built on all these old UNIX version though. Perhaps Thom can use the mailx with IMAP support for his HP-UX install.
There seem to be plenty of UNIX userlands these days, but I guess there are three core traditions: SystemV (Hierloom), BSD, and GNU.