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11/30/2004 Archived Entry: "The BSD Unix agreement"

No joy in FUDville, contd.: After ten years, the agreement between U.C. Berkeley and Unix Systems Laboratories has been revealed. This was the last big lawsuit over Unix "intellectual property," and was settled quietly out of court, with the result that only 26 files of Berkeley's "Net 2 BSD" open-source Unix were restricted from general distribution. Which means that, even if parts of Linux were derived from Unix files -- and all the evidence is to the contrary -- it doesn't matter, because the ten-years-ago owner of the Unix copyrights explicitly gave permission for them to be used and adapted.

This eviscerates SCO's IP case against Linux. Although, frankly, that legal case has been eviscerated so many different ways now that I'm surprised it has any viscera left.       -- brad