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Microsoft and Sun licensesMicrosoft and Sun licensesPosted Aug 12, 2007 1:14 UTC (Sun) by gdt (subscriber, #6284)Parent article: A bad day for the SCO Group
What is the status of the licenses Microsoft purchased from SCO for Services for UNIX and Sun purchased for FreeSolaris? In Sun's case this was more than the licensing terms that SCO was authorised by Novell to offer: "rights equivalent to ownership" said Sun. [Stirring the possum follows] Ironically, this now raises the dark cloud of intellectual property misuse over FreeSolaris. Does Sun believe that FreeSolaris contains no unlicensed UNIX code and are they going to offer users an indemnity should the owner of UNIX copyrights determine otherwise :-)
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Microsoft and Sun licenses Posted Aug 12, 2007 5:59 UTC (Sun) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Well Solaris is based a lot off of SunOS, which was mostly BSD. Plus back when SCO was making noises about IP and stirring things up Sun did make a sizable payment to SCO (which a lot of people gave Sun crap about at the time).
Presumably this was Sun settling any sort of IP issues with SCO related to their use of Unix in Solaris. If this is so then it's just more money that SCO owes Novell and Sun doesn't enter into it any longer and no user or supporter of OpenSolaris (or variants) has nothing to worry about.
Microsoft and Sun licenses Posted Aug 12, 2007 18:15 UTC (Sun) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] I have no idea where you got that idea.. Solaris is a SysV style kernel and toolset not BSD/SunOS. That was the major drag between the days of SunOS 4.1.4 and Solaris 2.1 because so little worked together.
Microsoft and Sun licenses Posted Aug 13, 2007 5:58 UTC (Mon) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link] Well, Solaris 8 has also the title SunOS 5.8
There has been a merge somewhere along the line.
Microsoft and Sun licenses Posted Aug 13, 2007 9:56 UTC (Mon) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] If my memory serves me well, SunOS 4.x and below are BSD, while SunOS 5.0 onwards are SysV. To emphasise the change, Sun's always released SysV-based SunOS under the Solaris label, not as a separate SunOS product, although Solaris is just branding for the newer SunOS products.
Microsoft and Sun licenses Posted Aug 13, 2007 15:05 UTC (Mon) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link] Ugh... Solaris vs. SunOS naming rears its ugly head again. The Solaris name first applied to SunOS 4.1.x along with the windowing environment and so on that was placed on top of it. SunOS 4.x and before was based on BSD. The Solaris name wasn't pushed really heavily. Indeed, according to the article I linked above, the Solaris name was constructed for the SunOS 5.x release, and then backfitted onto the SunOS 4.1.x products while SunOS 5 was in development. With SunOS 5.x, Sun more heavily emphasized the Solaris name, with Solaris 2.0 corresponding to SunOS 5.0. When Solaris 2 came out, the SunOS name kinda drifted into the background. SunOS 5 / Solaris 2 was a big deal, as it was that version that shifted to a SysV base in contrast to the BSD base that had been under previous SunOS releases. So, in terms of public perception, "SunOS" is the "BSD based version" and "Solaris" is the "SysV based version." But, in reality, both monikers have applied to both variants. Yay marketing.
Microsoft and Sun licenses Posted Aug 12, 2007 11:48 UTC (Sun) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] Here's a quote from the beginning of the article you linked to. It seems to answer your questions to an extent (strange you managed to misread it, the "rights equivalent to ownership" comment is not about the Sun/SCO deal):
"Schwartz: We took a license from AT&T initially for $100 million as we didn't own the IP. The license we took also made clear that we had rights equivalent to ownership. When we did the deal with SCO earlier this year we bought a bunch of drivers "
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