[Talk] Re: [Linux-aus] SCO position, rationale and AUUG

[Chris Maltby]

> > There's a nice piece on the BSD history and the lawsuit in Kirk
> > McKusick's BSD chapter of the O'Reilly OpenSources book at:
> >
> > 	http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 06:05:50PM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> Yes, it's correct.  To quote:
> 
>   Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by
>   Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would
>   rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of
>   1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had
>   dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further
>   prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points
>   were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January
>   1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000
>   that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes
>   were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add
>   USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to
>   be freely redistributed.
> 
> Thanks for the info.

There's a missing piece to this story (I don't know if Kirk goes on
to add something like):

    One of the more unexpected outcomes was that USL was found to
    have breached the rights of the authors of the BSD code and
    so they were obliged to add attributions to System V source
    code for all the "borrowings" it made from various BSDs. A
    project was launched to identify the contributors of those
    borrowings so that the correct attributions could be made in
    the System V source.

Chris