1994 BSD/Unix Settlement Released On Groklaw

davidwr writes "Groklaw has the newly-released-previously-secret 1994 Berkeley/UNIX Systems Laboratories settlement which gave rise to BSD4.4(Lite) (as pdf and text with commentary). This may have an impact on the SCO vs. Linux war."

Comments

pay the cost to be the boss

[Doc Ruby]

These corporations take their feuds into the courts, where we pay taxes for them to produce justice. Then they settle, because the actual trial completion costs too much and is too risky for their own investment in justice. So we get no return on our investment in justice, but the corporations do, without the full cost or risk. They should have to at least register their settlement terms, especially since they'll next expect our courts to enforce them. The judge should decide whether they can keep the settlement secret, and for how long, so we can at least get some contribution to the justice we're funding. Otherwise, we're just funding expensive corporate negotiations.

No

[ColourlessGreenIdeas]

The current BSDs are all forks of the version of BSD that was released to comply with this ruling. Which doesn't include the restricted files (those in Exhibit A) We've always known they were clean. We just hadn't previously known what it was about them that made them clean.

no

[twitter]

You ask:

does any of this in any way impact the slew of child BSD's out there?

The answer is no. Nobody but SCO has anything to worry about. As Grocklaw astutely notes:

Now we know why SCO keeps telling us the case is "just a contract" case, why it has a penchant for suing only those who are, or were, their licensees, and why it sued IBM instead of Red Hat. USL preserves its rights against licensees under the license agreements. I see no expanded rights against third parties who are not licensees, just the preexisting right to try to sue them, with the same likely outcome that USL experienced when it tried to sue the University and BSDi, using the same lame copyright claims that the judge back then found so unconvincing.

SCO owns nothing useful and never has. They have yet to show any infringement by IBM nor will they ever. The whole thing is FUD, funded by your friends at M$ and a pump and dump scheme, in short fraud and anti-competitive fraud. I hope someone goes to jail for it.