SCO owns the World?

SCO owns the World?

Posted Jun 19, 2003 9:49 UTC (Thu) by ronzone (guest, #10671)
Parent article: SCO owns the World?

Ugh, as much as SCO should burn in hell, blah blah, I think something thatvhappened 20+ years ago WRT UNIX may be coming back to bite us.

In thise days, especially at places like UniSoft (which did SUN's initial
port to the 68000 Multibus boards, inasmuch as SUN *hates* to admit this), UniSoft (a Berkely UNIX portinh house) had a zillion customers that all wanted source code, which, IIRM, was around $100,000.

Lomg story short, a much much cheaper way to get source code to customers was a legal "pretend" that the customer was actually a sub-contractor to UniSoft, and all its work was therefore legally UniSoft owned.

Of course, we at UniSoft spent much time assuring the customer that OF COURSE UNISOFT WOULD NEVER EVER DO THAT.

A lawyer back then even mention what could happen, specifically things like SCO situations.

There were about 400+ customes of UniSoft by the time it died, and I think about 60 cases of "subcontractor source licenses".

I worked on AIX a few years later, and I know IBM had its own master source code license, and hence should not have been affected.

In addition, this issue becaome a problem only with System Vm System II, and I believe the BSD 2.x and 4.x were allegedly "immune".

The moral is: AT&T was incredibky anal-retentive on nits UNIX source code, and every lawyer I worked with on this strseed all the SCO0like landmines in it and the great care that needed to be taken.

Of course, us tech-weenies had the attitude of :heck, that'll never bother us, let's go code come more ...".

Kind of makes me sick nowadays ...

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