Slashdot Mirror
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."
a little history
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.
--
make install -not war
Exhibit G is a death certificate for BSD!
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.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
I dunno. How is that war on Drugs, and the war on terrah going for you guys? :)
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A little history lesson.
/<-rad commands like gopher wiretap.spies.com and zmodem phrack_15.tgz, which is what I and my fellow teenaged geeks were really looking to do. Some of my friends with whom I chose to use Linux, rather than BSD, have gone onto greatness, notably Nat Friedman of Ximian/Novell. (I, however, am an utter fucking nobody, which is fine. :)
For those of us accustomed to Unix and looking to run it on our desktops in the early 1990s, we found that there were very few options at the time. The popular choice was BSD, but those of us who read Boardwatch and kept up with the choice few Usenet groups knew only that there was some kind of a BSD lawsuit that made it bad to use. The details were fuzzy, but we thought that BSD would be a dead end.
Instead, we used Linux. It was much less popular, and way underpowered (compared to BSD), but it was unencumbered by lawsuits and would let us run all of those
I'll wager that, if not for the FUD that came of this lawsuit, BSD would be the OS of choice for geeks today. Instead, Linux is far more popular -- I continue to use it a decade later, with the vague guilt that I would be cooler if I were running BSD. I wonder to what degree the SCO FUD is similarly affecting the choice of Linux today?
-Waldo Jaquith
What with Solaris's recent still-mysterious "open sourcing", the large amount of cash infused into SCO by Sun Microsystems, the increasingly common yet always vague claims by Sun executives that "intellectual property issues" will become of increasing importance in software development in the near future, and the strange repeated claims by Sun executives that Linux "wouldn't have happened" if Solaris had been "open sourced" five years ago...
One wonders if Sun Microsystems might be hoping that the SCO suit will drive people from Linux to Solaris the same way that the USL suit drove people from BSD to Linux.
According to you, more people were using BSD despite the lawsuit.
More people were using BSD because Linux barely existed. The Linux kernel hadn't even gone 1.0. It was under 1MB. It wasn't a matter of the lawsuit -- it was that Linux was unknown.
Moreover, you do not consider the very real philosophical difference between the BSD and GNU people.
What you mean is that I did not (past tense) consider the philosophical differences. And you're right -- I was totally uninterested. We didn't have "open source" -- the phrase didn't exist. We had free software. Both BSD and Linux were free. Both had source to edit. What teenager cared about some contract?
I'll wager that many of your peers made the choice based on the philisophical grounds.
My older friends surely chose based on philosophical grounds -- those old enough to be in any way interested in IP and related freedoms. I was writing for 2600 and decompiling and modifying MS-DOS for fun -- wasn't no contract going to stop me from doing whatever I wanted with an OS, or so I figured.
But you were the man on the spot, you tell me, was it impending abuse and the desire to not aid the abusers as obvious then as it is now?
I'm afraid that I'm not sure that I understand your question. But perhaps it would answer your question to restate my premise: we had no idea what the deal was with the lawsuit. Abuse schmabuse -- we figured that BSD might go away (whatever that would constitute), so why bet on a losing horse?
-Waldo Jaquith