Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 70.2.168.182]
on July 29, 2008 09:49 PM
The amount of historical ignorance here (including Vaughan-Nichols'), is staggering. I'm doing this from memory, but I remember clearly that Sun bought out the full rights to the Unix System V source code (the basis of Solaris 2.x and up) from Novell (which itself had recently purchased majority ownership in Unix Systems Lab from AT&T) back in the mid-1990's. Sun, of course, already owned the rights to SunOS (also called Solaris 1.x), which was largely based on Bill Joy's Berkeley's BSD Unix, not AT&T's System V.
I was just about to join Sun at the time, so I paid close attention to the transaction. This was a true technology and IP "buy-out" - Sun paid several million dollars for a full and perpetual buy-out of all AT&T/Novell/USL System V code and technologies. This was a big deal, because Sun was no free to use and modify the System V code in ways that were more difficult for their competitors, especially IBM, HP, SGI, and DEC.
Because of this, Sun has been free to do whatever it wants with Unix for over 15 years. (IIRC, a similar agreement was signed a couple of years later by IBM, which got a better deal than Sun did.
Bottom line, as I understand it, there is NO possible exposure for Sun - AFAIK, they and IBM are the only companies that are fully lawsuit-proof in this regard - and this is the fundamental reason that Sun could offer several years ago to indemnify its customers and users against any and all claims of IP infringement such as the SCO suit. SInce their license was a complete buy-out, they are completely free to do anything they want with the code, including opening the source of Solaris. (FWIW, for the last 15 years, most Sun customers could get the Solaris source code from their SE for the asking, anyway...)
Learn about Linux
Download Linux
Get Linux help
Is OpenSolaris in hot water?
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 70.2.168.182] on July 29, 2008 09:49 PMI was just about to join Sun at the time, so I paid close attention to the transaction. This was a true technology and IP "buy-out" - Sun paid several million dollars for a full and perpetual buy-out of all AT&T/Novell/USL System V code and technologies. This was a big deal, because Sun was no free to use and modify the System V code in ways that were more difficult for their competitors, especially IBM, HP, SGI, and DEC.
Because of this, Sun has been free to do whatever it wants with Unix for over 15 years. (IIRC, a similar agreement was signed a couple of years later by IBM, which got a better deal than Sun did.
Bottom line, as I understand it, there is NO possible exposure for Sun - AFAIK, they and IBM are the only companies that are fully lawsuit-proof in this regard - and this is the fundamental reason that Sun could offer several years ago to indemnify its customers and users against any and all claims of IP infringement such as the SCO suit. SInce their license was a complete buy-out, they are completely free to do anything they want with the code, including opening the source of Solaris. (FWIW, for the last 15 years, most Sun customers could get the Solaris source code from their SE for the asking, anyway...)
#