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August 16, 2007
well, duh...
no surprise on this decision...
Yes, a judge has confirmed that Novell owns the copyrights to the Unix operating system, but that doesn't mean the company plans to start suing people for using Linux. It will leave such behavior to companies that don't own the copyrights. Like SCO.
No kidding. AT&T Bell Labs was where UNIX was invented. Because of an anti-trust consent decree from the 50s, Ma Bell couldn't sell UNIX, so they licensed it for nothing to UC Berkeley, which started that branch of the OS. That branch spawned *BSD, Digital UNIX/Tru64, and SunOS. When Ma Bell was broken up in 1984, they sued Berkeley to try to rein in the product, but that ship had already sailed. Still, their copyrights were still intact, and passed to Lucent Technologies when Bell Labs spun off from the Death Star. Then Lucent sold UNIX to Novell. End of discussion.
SCO got started because two guys named Gates and Allen were in the operating system porting business, and they wanted to port UNIX to the PC. Ma Bell said, OK, but you have to change the name, in case your product sucks. They did, and XENIX was born. Microsoft gave up on the product, and their Santa Cruz Operation became an independent company. Still, their product originated with the Death Star, so it transferred to Novell. Novell sold the trademark to SCO in 1995, but not the copyright to the product.
And that's a good thing, given how popular Linux is now. The notion of everyone having to pony up to SCO was disturbing. Fortunately, Novell's put that issue to bed:
"We have absolutely no intention of using our Unix copyright ownership to attack Linux," Novell spokesperson Bruce Lowry told The Reg. "We've had those copyrights for the past 14 or 15 years. The fact that the court has reaffirmed them doesn't mean we're now going to change the way we operate. We've never indicated we would use those copyrights against Linux - and we wouldn't. In fact, we want to defend Linux."
and considering Novell owns SuSe Linux now, that makes perfect sense.
Posted by Leader at August 16, 2007 7:57 PM