http://www.sco.com/scosource/SCOFile...gainstIBM.html

in my opinion, there is a simple solution to this, a large company, like IBM, should buy the rights from SCO, and then make their rights to UNIX freely available. could they do something likethat? could they even change the license completely? like to GPL?

OK, now I'm confused.

I thought that X/Open owned UNIX and that was the basis of their action against this site for using unix.com.

Now I read (in the above link) that SCO says they own UNIX.

Does anyone know who actually owns UNIX?

X/Open claims they were given the UNIX trademark from SCO, or something to that effect.... this is really interesting... ..

I'm confused too...

Perhaps this SCO link helps explain the SCO position better:

http://www.sco.com/scosource/

Well, I don't think anybody really understands whats going on with this - it seems to be some sort of poli-techinal "fireman's contest", to put it politely.

There's a short article on it here:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...nixsuit08.html

I don't think they've hit it quite on the head, though. Just as a further evidence on the misunderstandings of this issue, below is a link to a comment posted on Slashdot by Bruce Perens ( for those who have not heard the name before, Bruce Perens is an adamant Open Source advocate, and I believe he still works for HP):
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=...=56225&tid=123

As for the trademark name, X/Open {(r)(t) and so on} does acknoledge the use of the Unix name to companies who have "bought" the name before they had it - one of them being SCO (the current owner of the direct descendent sysVr4 code). Heck, you can browse true Unix code online now: http://minnie.tuhs.org/UnixTree/ . I've even gotten SystemV and older versions running on a linux box using PDP-11 emulators...

And then again, maybe Bruce (and the rest of the world) is way off... Hey, being that I'm up here in Cupertino for a while for training at HP (Their campus is across the street right now - in fact I can see it out the window), maybe I could track down Mr. Perens and ask him whats going on

Hey, now that I think about it, Caldera (was SCO, now I think it's SCO Group - not sure) released some modern Unix source code, specifically the regexp libraries and a regexp utility ( I believe awk, but I'm not sure ). I can't find the site now though, but I did find this:
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/li...8/caldera.html

Interesting read, although it speaks of the release of the old code I linked to above.

Also, it should be noted that TUHS worked out a deal to license the old Unix binary system images with SCO a long time ago. That's when I got SystemV running - I applied for and received a free non-commercial license for it. It's just not bound to the same license now, and code is available.

Anyways, I'll just stick to Linux, and failing that, *BSD, and not really have to deal with it.

Posted again to Slashdot this morning was a link to a straight forward analysis.

Interesting, but keep in mind where their bias lie as well.

Also, Dennis Ritchie posted some old documents detailing AT&T vs. BSDI nine years ago on his personal site.

The Open Group has published their answer to my question on one of their web sites. I have to say that I finally understand the difference between what The Open Group claims to own and what SCO claims to own.

Backgrounder on the UNIX® System and SCO / IBM legal action