The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

Posted Mar 7, 2023 18:11 UTC (Tue) by biergaizi (guest, #92498)
In reply to: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later by Wol
Parent article: The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later

> I seriously doubt they either audited and removed code by AT&T, or removed all code of unknown provenance, which they would have had to do to make the *first* statement.

So BSDi managed to invalidate AT&T's copyright claim without the need to claim BSD's independence. But a code rewritting campaign to free BSD from AT&T code definitely exist. Perhaps not 100% rigorous in a legal sense, but it was still a systematic campaign. According to the O'Reilly book Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution [1], BSD's core developer Kirk McKusick said they recruited many volunteers on this project.

> During one of our weekly group meetings at the CSRG, Keith Bostic brought up the subject of the popularity of the freely-redistributable networking release and inquired about the possibility of doing an expanded release that included more of the BSD code. Mike Karels and I pointed out to Bostic that releasing large parts of the system was a huge task, but we agreed that if he could sort out how to deal with reimplementing the hundreds of utilities and the massive C library then we would tackle the kernel. Privately, Karels and I felt that would be the end of the discussion.

> Undeterred, Bostic pioneered the technique of doing a mass net-based development effort. He solicited folks to rewrite the Unix utilities from scratch based solely on their published descriptions. Their only compensation would be to have their name listed among the Berkeley contributors next to the name of the utility that they rewrote. The contributions started slowly and were mostly for the trivial utilities. But as the list of completed utilities grew and Bostic continued to hold forth for contributions at public events such as Usenix, the rate of contributions continued to grow. Soon the list crossed one hundred utilities and within 18 months nearly all the important utilities and libraries had been rewritten.

This version eventually became 4.3BSD Net/2. This was why UCB allowed its public release, including to users without an AT&T's Unix license. This was why BSDi was confident enough to launch its competing system based on BSD without worrying about AT&T.

AT&T sued anyway.

[1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/kirkmck...