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Some History of Unix

Some pertinant historical notes on Unix

The court's findings on whether snippets of Dynix or AIX code have been incorporated into Linux are trumped by Novell's instructions to The SCO Group to waive their claims against IBM. Any SCO wailing-and-gesticulation after that is kind of pointless, at least in legal terms.

IBM is free to donate whatever it pleases out of Dynix and AIX to whomever it pleases, as long as that code was not in the original System V codebase. It's still not clear from TSG's vague but ambitious claims that the code in question was actually contributed from Dynix, either.

But... the original System V code is based on code which in the earlier USL-vs-BSD case was in the judge's opinion Public Domain, so even if code was copied from System V, there is still an obligation on SCO to prove that any copied bit wasn't in the Public Domain anyway, and that they didn' release it themselves.

The SCO Group really are seriously up the creek in a barbed-wire nowey sans paddle. And the counterclaims haven't been addressed yet.

How many other cases exist where [company] has included third party technology in it products, but has also taken the cheaper licensing option and left developers and even users exposed to the threat of lawsuit? Due to the closed nature of the proprietary business model, how can third party developers even check? — NZheretic on LWN

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