The people complaining that this isn't free-as-in-freedom should remember that there's a lot of code in here that Nokia/Alcatel-Lucent does not and has never owned. 10th edition, specifically, was never 'distributed' and probably could not be because it contained gcc. You'll note these archives are not even hosted by the corporation. They STILL aren't 'distributing' any of this. There's no way to know a priori whether there's someone else's IP in here... the packaging method for these versions of unix was "Dennis makes a copy of a running system, including whatever happened to be on that disk."
So, this is a kind gesture made for the benefit of software archaeologists. Retroactively applying some kind of modern-hippie license would cost a tremendous amount of time and money.
Folks aren't necessarily complaining about the release, rather, the issue was with the title which previously incorrectly called the release "open source". HN admins have since changed the title, see comments further down.
V10 hardly contained gcc. People imported whatever external software they wanted. Norman Wilson's tape doesn't include gcc, Dan Cross' tape does. However, gcc wasn't used by anything in v10, the system compiler was based on pcc.
While the engineer in me abhors the lack of process in their releases, I like the idea of their almost genetic distribution on a, like, LSD tripping level.
As a matter of fact, whenever I think about the original UNIX and how far we've come from that to modern day operating systems, I get a little nostalgic, and feel like back then software development was done for much more than just money.
Also, it's pity that this work of art (and many other pieces of software alike) have always been under the ownership of some "corporate" guys.
Go tell that to companies that deliver crippled unusable community edition only so they can put an Open-Source sticker on their paying premium product...
So, this is a kind gesture made for the benefit of software archaeologists. Retroactively applying some kind of modern-hippie license would cost a tremendous amount of time and money.