[bediger]

There's some speculation that the vague wording (your item 9) comes from AT&T knowing that some of the code in System V wasn't the cleanest with respect to copyright. AT&T did essentially lose its own lawsuit against Univ of California over BSD Unix. Some SysV code might actually be BSD code with UC copyright notice removed. Also, some SysV code might be 32V unix code, which was distributed without the copyright notice that was required of copyrighted material back in the day. So 32V code was in the public domain.

In any case, copyrights aren't all that clear with SysV, so Novell selling them outright might have caused even more litigation, with System V maybe ending up public domain.

But it is an unholy mess.