SCO Unix Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart

[Jerry Feldman]

On Thu, 1 May 2003 09:58:17 -0400
David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> wrote:

> To my knowledge, Caldera tried to create a very Windows-like, easy to
> install, easy to use Linux experience.  Except, like with Red Hat's
> and SuSE's first few attempts to do the same, the apps failed
> horribly, because the UI was not intuitive, the saved data would get
> out of sync with the config files, and they would crash.
> 
> I don't know if any of this ended up in other distributions, but I
> sincerely hope not.
If I recall, when AT&T sued BSDI, the issues were not copyright, but the
Unix look and feel et. al. The industry believed that the AT&T suit was
based on copyrighted code in BSD branch which led to the growth of
Linux. (Lar Kauffman explained this in one of his meetings). Had AT&T
been successful, they would have effectively shut down FreeBSD as well
as Linux and all other non-licensed Unix knockoffs, including OSF1. I'm
not familiar with the details of SCO's suit against IBM. They have not
sued any of the Linux distros, but if they are successful, and IBM did
pollute the kernel sources, there could be some general issues. I
suspect that over the long haul, the biggest loser might be SCO itself. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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