| Florian Weimer 2004-12-27, 5:52 pm |
| * Andreas Barth:
> * Florian Weimer (fw@deneb.enyo.de) [041227 19:50]:
>
>
>
> IIRC, Microsoft paid them.
This was a strategic investment. Microsoft distributes the (Open)BSD
userland, which has been cleared from AT&T copyright in a lawsuit in
the early 90s.
Sun insists that it's got a fully paid up, perpetual System V source
code license -- and they better have such a beast because Solaris
source code is so easily accessible to anyone interested.
The other settlements are token settlements at much lower rates than
the advertized ones, designed to give SCO a better stand. (I believe
the EV1 settlement has been dissected afterwards, and there haven't
been much else.)
More important, SCO's case is based on copyright, not patents, so it's
much easier to check if their case has at least some merit and the
claims are not completely frivolous. OTOH, they finally claimed
copyright infringement on something that was a genuine System V
development (previous claims rested on the alleged viral nature of
IBM's System V source code license from AT&T, which was a very weak
argument indeed).
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