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Originally Posted by alexander
SunOS was once based on Berkley Systems Unix code, but not for that long, Solaris was much modified, most Unix parts were rewritten speciffically for their system, Sun is smarter than using the original code, they have lawyers who know copyright, as well as patent laws, and i dont think they hold license to use Unix, Solaris 10 is such a huge mix of code from different Unis systems. The only true Unix out there is BSD, because BSD is Unix, well technically there's no Original Unix left, for a good reason, 1960 technology is a bit old...
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Ya missed a step. Orig Sun OS was a BSD* port (cuz Bill Joy wrote so much of it at Berkeley, whadda ya expect him to do when he goes to start Sun with Scott?). Unfortunately, AT&T got most everyone except for DEC (Ultrix was also BSD) to go with the System V code base, so to be compatible, after much grumbling by the true believers, Solaris was built and was a System V port. Since then, lots of the old SunOS code got put back in where it made sense to, along with a LOT more code developed in house. You'd be amazed how much old code is still around in the code base, as the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" rule is golden. There's no question that SCO has a plausible lawsuit. Most are doubting that every line of code was rewritten to the point that you could not argue that the rewrite was superficial and retained the "spirit" of the orginal code (the rights are based not only on copyright but on licensing restrictions that are more vague). SCO did buy the System V license rights...
Linus was brilliant to say, "I've never seen the code, I'm gonna write it from scratch", which is almost EXACTLY what Compaq did when they built the first IBM PC clone. WRT Linux, the only hope SCO has is to say that some of the contributors had access to Unix source and "willfully and without regard to SCO's license rights" contributed the System V-derivative to the Linux code base. Of course since Linus has never seen that code, even if he had inspected it, he wouldn't know that it was derivative, thus giving SCO an opening on legal (but pretty darn likely baseless) grounds. Most people who know don't believe that any infringing code amounts to enough that it couldn't be rewritten easily to be non-infringing. Solaris sounds like a much more problematic situation tho....
Old code all rewritten? Don Knuth, Kernigan & Plaugher, Niklaus Wirth, and maybe Chris Date are ALL you need to read to understand good programming (and okay, okay, I'll throw in Bjarne Stroustrup, but so much C++ design was influenced by Smalltalk from 10 years earlier). Mebe yur not old enuf to remember Y2K
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Originally Posted by alexander
What i meant was the Linux ways.... <snip />
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Won't argue about any of the rest of what you wrote!
Cheers,
Buffy
* BSD = Berkeley Standard Distribution: branched off of the AT&T System III Unix code base and heavily redone as a research project at UC Berkeley mostly coded by Bill Joy, Eric Allman, Michael Toy, and a zillion other grad students who were there from about 1975 to 1984. BSD/OS was the commercialized version that used to be from BSDI, which got bought up by Windriver Systems. Got rewritten linux-like into NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD among others. "Berkeley Systems" were the great folks that brought you the classic screen saver "After Dark" but didn't have anything to do with Unix....
