Sun's OpenSolaris lacks copyright license

Sun's Jonathan Schwartz likes to tout how many copies of Solaris people have downloaded. Now, it turns out that Sun actually had no license to do it. Sun purportedly acquired the license from SCO, but SCO did not have the right to grant the license at all.

So, Novell will ask Sun for $1billion and Sun will sue SCO for indemnity, but since SCO has no money, Sun will have to pay the bill. $100 per download may not be a unreasonable number, given the importance of UNIX code.