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Apple Sued Over Unix Trademark
Jerrry writes "CNET News reports The Open Group is suing Apple over unlicensed use of the Unix trademark, after Apple used the term in conjunction with its Mac OS X marketing. Apple, meanwhile, is countersuing to have the Unix trademark declared invalid because the term has become generic."
If the latest revalations regarding IBM's possible leakage of copyrighted Unix code into Linux have proven anything, it is that using any derivative of this outdated operating system is a legal disaster waiting to happen. Not only is Linux licensed under the anti-business GNU General Public License, but it turns out that commercial code may have been unlawfully added, making it illegal to use or distribute.
This should suprise no one familiar with the history of Unix. The earliest version was an unlicensed ripoff of the proprietary Multics operating system, and was partly responsible for destroying the market for this pioneering operating system. The Berkeley Shareware Distribution (BSD) was sued by AT&T in the early 1990s, for openly distributing copyrighted code in its public-domain source releases. As if this wasn't enough, it turned out that AT&T had also broken the license on code they had taken from BSD, leaving both sides forced to essentially accept the other's illegal behavior in order to avoid stiffer penalties.
Reputable software companies such as Microsoft, though initially interested in Unix, have learned to steer clear of the mess of standards, licenses, and conflicting intellectual property rights that Unix forms. Microsoft Windows XP is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship version of Windows, built from the ground up in the early 1990s based on the most modern concepts in operating systems, without any legacy baggage from the 1970s. And it is available essentially for free, preloaded on hardware from all major manufacturers. There is really no reason to use anything else, unless you need a truly high-performance computing system such as IBM's proprietary OS/390 or HP's OpenVMS.
FreeBSD is *genetic* Unix
FreeBSD, which is genetic Unix
OS X is also genetic Unix
I know the 't' key is right next to the 'r' key, but c'mon... three times in one post?
The marketing would be even better. Imagine "OSX is the most sellable Linux distro!". Or even "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of OSX!" :)
Also imagine if they would hire Linus and made PPC as the major codeline in the tree, while x86 would be among others.
Hmm... imagine if they would hire RMS!..
Less is more !
An AC wrote:
;)
> I know you're retarded and a troll, but Windows hasn't
> become a generic term. When you hear/think/read
> Windows in a computer-context, what do you think?
> Microsoft Windows. QED.
Actually, I think of the X Window System. It was this way cool GUI I was using on a job back in 1989. It had these things called windows that it ran separate programs in. It could even pretend the desktop was an aquarium, and have fish swimming behind the windows. It is still around, on OSes like BSD and Linux, and now on my Mac.
Yeah, I heard at the time that there was this new thing called "Microsoft Windows" on a PC down the hall, but it could hardly even manage to task switch. Heck, it still doesn't run too good, even after all these years. Why anyone would want to use it instead of the X Window System or Apple's OS X (or both) is beyond me.
"Your way of thinking is completely different from mine!"
Mac user Shinoda to PC user Katagiri, "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)
(From the world's biggest switch commercial, starring Apple's biggest fan: Godzilla!)