[TUHS] Microsoft, SCO, and a certain License

[grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)]

On Sunday, 29 February 2004 at 20:34:03 +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
> I know the SCO topic's been done to death, and all, but I was thinking about
> the Microsoft purchase of a Unix license (apparently) for their MS SFU
> (Windows Services For Unix) which contrary to the plain meaning of the name,
> is essentially a Unix (apparently OpenBSD, according to rumour) box on top of
> the Windows kernel and Win32 API.
>
> The question is, wouldn't that put Microsoft and the SCO Group in
> breach of the settlement between AT&T and Berkeley?

That settlement was superseded by Caldera's release of Ancient UNIX
two years ago.  See http://www.lemis.com/grog/UNIX/ and
http://www.lemis.com/grog/UNIX/ancient-source-all.pdf.

> If Win SFU _is_ OpenBSD, and Microsoft have bought a license to run
> it from the SCO Group of all people,

If it's OpenBSD, SCO can't give anybody a license to use it.

> isn't that in effect picking a fight with Theo de Raadt?

Why?  As long as they use it within the terms of the license, I can't
see that anybody can object.  As you can see from
http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html, about the only thing Microsoft
could do wrong there would be not to recognize openly the fact that
they got it from OpenBSD.

> This isn't definite, of course - some details I'm not sure of.

The most important detail is whether it was, in fact, derived from
OpenBSD.  This sounds very unlikely to me.  If it were the case, why
would they pay anything to SCO?

> But I think if this is so, we have some very interesting few years
> to look forward to.

Even then, there's little that people can complain about.

Greg
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