OT: Cutthroat Microsoft Tactic

[Thermodyne]

You are missing the point entirely! Open source does not generate enough income to insure their products, let alone defend them in court. And if SCO wins, they will have the resources to take a very close look at Linux code along with the other Xnix systems out there. There is a lot of pure UNIX code in most Nix operating systems. To have to go back and clean it all up or face long court battles will take cash. Cash that the Open Source community does not generate. To defend them will take cash. Cash that they do not have. This action is a predatory stroke of legal genius. And at its roots are the very fundamentals of capitalism. This is capitalistic big business/wealthy people, against socialistic give it out for free small business/poor people.

Now don�t get me wrong, I don�t want to see you Linux guys loose your OS of choice. But I also do strongly support the basic principals of capitalism as they exist today. For me personally, this will be of great interest to watch unfold. It will set the stage for the software of the next decade. And it is following the trend of past court battles, allowing for some coins to be made in the short term.

Also, I was of the (wrong) opinion that UNIX was old and dieing as the older systems were replaced with new iron. We personally have an old AS300 about to go out the door, which will be the end of UNIX for us. But I was researching the people with claims to things that are UNIX and I found that a place caller the Open Group owns the UNIX trade mark. When I took a look at their site, I found a time line that shows UNIX is continuing to evolve. And show or perhaps imply a close connection to the Linux/BSD communities.

Quote from the Open Group:

1969 The Beginning The history of UNIX starts back in 1969, when Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others started working on the "little-used PDP-7 in a corner" at Bell Labs and what was to become UNIX.

1971 First Edition It had a assembler for a PDP-11/20, file system, fork(), roff and ed. It was used for text processing of patent documents.

1973 Fourth Edition It was rewritten in C. This made it portable and changed the history of OS's.

1975 Sixth Edition UNIX leaves home. Also widely known as Version 6, this is the first to be widely available out side of Bell Labs. The first BSD Version (1.x) was derived from V6.

1979 Seventh Edition It was a "improvement over all preceding and following Unices" [Bourne]. It had C, UUCP and the Bourne shell. It was ported to the VAX and the kernel was more than 40 Kilobytes (K).

1980 Xenix Microsoft introduces Xenix. 32V and 4BSD introduced.

1982 System III AT&T's UNIX System Group (USG) release System III, the first public release outside Bell Laboratories.

1983 System V Computer Research Group (CRG), UNIX System Group (USG) and a third group merge to become UNIX System Development Lab. AT&T announces UNIX System V, the first supported release.

1984 4.2BSD University of California at Berkeley releases 4.2BSD, includes TCP/IP, new signals and much more.

1984 SVR2 System V Release 2 introduced. At this time there are 100,000 UNIX installations around the world.

1986 4.3BSD 4.3BSD released, including internet name server

1987 SVR3 System V Release 3 including STREAMS, TLI, RFS. At this time there are 750,000 UNIX installations around the world.

1988 POSIX.1 published. Open Software Foundation (OSF) and UNIX International (UI) formed.

1989 AT&T UNIX Software Operation formed in preparation for spinoff of USL.

1989 SVR4 UNIX System V Release 4 ships, unifying System V, BSD and Xenix

1990 XPG3 X/Open launches XPG3 Brand

1991 UNIX System Laboratories (USL) becomes a company - majority-owned by AT&T. Linus Torvalds commences Linux development

1992 SVR4.2 USL releases UNIX System V Release 4.2 (Destiny). October - XPG4 Brand launched by X/Open. December 22nd Novell announces intent to acquire USL.

1993 4.4BSD 4.4BSD the final release from Berkeley. June 16 Novell acquires USL

Late 1993 SVR4.2MP Novell transfers rights to the "UNIX" trademark and the Single UNIX Specification to X/Open. In December Novell ships SVR4.2MP , the final USL OEM release of System V

1994 4.4-Lite BSD 4.4-Lite eliminated all code claimed to infringe on USL/Novell

1995 UNIX 95 X/Open introduces the UNIX 95 branding programme. Novell sells UnixWare business to SCO.

1996 The Open Group forms as a merger of OSF and X/Open.

1997 Single UNIX Specification, Version 2 The Open Group introduces Version 2 of the Single UNIX Specification, including support for realtime, threads and 64-bit and larger processors. The specification is made freely available on the web.

1998 UNIX 98 The Open Group introduces the UNIX 98 family of brands, including Base, Workstation and Server. First UNIX 98 registered products shipped by Sun, IBM and NCR. The Open Source movement starts to take off with announcements from Netscape and IBM

1999 UNIX at 30 The UNIX system reaches its 30th anniversary. Linux 2.2 kernel released. The Open Group and the IEEE commence joint development of a revision to POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification. First LinuxWorld conferences. Several Open Source companies launch successfully on the stock markets.

2001 Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification unites IEEE POSIX, The Open Group and the industry efforts. Linux 2.4 kernel released. IT stocks face a hard time at the markets.

2002 ISO/IEC 9945:2002 The core volumes of Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification are approved as an international standard.