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

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday, 22 May 2003 at 19:01:24 +1000, Chris Maltby wrote:
>>> 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.

Are you sure of this?  I did some work on syslogd (a BSD program) for
a nameless System V vendor a couple of years after the lawsuit was
settled, and there was no BSD license in the source.  I added one, and
it was removed again.

Greg
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