Re: Deposition of Otis L. Wilson...

From: Bill Campbell (bill_at_celestial.com)
Date: 10/02/04 

Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 20:28:44 GMT
To: Sco Mailing List <scomsc@xenitec.ca>

On Sat, Oct 02, 2004, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
...
>Baloney. AT&T went out of its way to control the distribution and use
>of its Unix licenses. There was a clause in the V7 license that
>required all derivative work, all modifications, and all bug fixes, to
>be submitted back to AT&T for inclusion into the code base. This was
>not enforced, but it was in the contract[1]. This was one major point
>of contention when some of the Unix licencees organized a defensive
>organization in 1988 against AT&T when AT&T bought 20% of Sun, under
>the assumption that Sun would get preferential development treatment.
>AT&T had to unload their shares or face a revolt. In the middle of
>all this, the issue of ownership of derivative work appeared and was
>finally dropped from the license.

I always thought that OSF was formed, not to protect Unix, but to make sure
it wasn't successful. Remember, the primary players in OSF were DEC and
IBM, two companies that had little or no presence in Unix at the time (in
spite of the fact that most Unix development at Bell Labs was done on DEC
hardware :-).

Bill 

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