SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 17:02 UTC (Mon) by ezrec (guest, #67736)
In reply to: SCO v. IBM reopened by sbergman27
Parent article: SCO v. IBM reopened

My favorite bit of folklore from the MS/SCO/Xenix transaction is the legend that the MS/SCO Xenix contract had a clause that prohibited MS from creating an operating system the implemented the copy-on-write semantics of the fork(2) system call.

If it were true, it would explain why MS was so gung-ho on threads....

SCO v. IBM reopened

Posted Jun 17, 2013 18:23 UTC (Mon) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

The fork(2) system call was implemented with copy-on-write semantics in the POSIX subsystem that was part of Windows NT 3.1 (the first release, in July 1993).

Of course, Microsoft dropped the POSIX subsystem like a hot potato once the government procurement requirement for POSIX compliance (FIPS 151-2) went away. It was no great loss, because the POSIX subsystem wasn't actually useful for anything.