That was the impression I got from the various Unix and UNIX(TM)
documents that Groklaw discussed during The SCO Group's Foot-In-Mouth
case against Linux, IBM and The Rest Of The World.

Wesley Parish

On 5/11/18, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> below...
>
> On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 5:09 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> LINUX Is Not UniX.
>
>
> A few thoughts ...
> 1.) Be careful - the US courts have said that *UNIX is not a code base or
> any one implementation - it's a set of ideas​.*  That is the whole basis of
> the BSDi case and why in the end AT&T lost.  It WAS their ideas, but it
> just can not be a trade secret.  If AT&T had been able to claim it as a
> trade secret, Linux, Minix, Coherent *et al *would have been in violation
> too (which is why it was so silly to sue them).
> 2.) I believe that Linux is the current popular implementation of UNIX.
>  Yes it hurts my fingers by some of the changes, but it looks, smells and
> quacks like duck.   Linux uses the AT&T IP -- the published ideas.  All of
> us on this list, just like Linus, are 'mentally contaminated' by Ken and
> Dennis's core idea.   That's the basic fact and it not going away.
> 3.) Claiming LINUX Is Not UniX is like saying FORTRAN95 is not FORTRAN
> because its not like F2, F4, F77 etc...   I'd like to point out that in
> fact, modern FTN compilers can pretty much accept the old code - which
> pretty darned amazing (and thankfully I'm not a compiler writer).    But
> for guys like me in the HPC business, FORTRAN is still useful, as it pays
> our salary.   The thing we have to remember is that the target matured, and
> moved on.  It aint quite like it was and there is no going back.
>
> I think that's the point and Ted and Larry have suggested so many times.
>  Linux took the token from AT&T, BSD, Solaris, *etc*... and moved it.  Some
> of us, myself included, find many of the changes gratuitous and a PITA, but
> that is the price of progress. I remember that a lot of people at AT&T
> thought the BSD changes were gratuitous too.   So Linux is the 3rd path of
> the UNIX heritage.
>
> Clem
> ᐧ
> ᐧ
>