Rik Harris wrote:
>
> Which sounds much like what happened with AT&T Unix source code
> licenses. I'm not sure whether there was any successful prosection,
> but people were considered "tainted", making it difficult to work
> on (say) BSD code.
That's not so. Prior to the release of BSD/Lite (that is,
BSD UNIX without AT&T code) you needed an AT&T source license
to work on the BSD code.
The licensing issues emerged when BSD had rewritten enough
of the AT&T code to totally supplant the AT&T code, that is,
when "4.3BSD UNIX" became "4.4BSD" (note no mention of "UNIX").
At that stage legal nastiness ensured. Eventually a handful of
minor utilities were removed as the arbitrating court decided
that they were substantially AT&T code. The court also gave
AT&T a huge serve about ethics of the legal action, noting
the flow of free code in the BSD-->AT&T direction.
Whilst the lawyers were sorting this out a lot of Unix
developers moved from BSD to Linux. Linux's development
had no involvement with AT&T and there was no fear of
developing code that would be left without an OS to
run on.
After all the legalities, BSD cut down 4.4BSD to remove
the four or so utilities and released 4.4BSD/Lite. By
then the Jolitz's had ported BSD to the 386. It's hard
to describe the impact of loading 30 floppy disks onto
your $1,500 computer, booting it and having it display
the same messages as the $40,000 Sun machine at work.
There is a lesson about licensing, big corporations and
nasty behaviour in the BSD saga, but with regard to the
Microsoft Shared Source License there is nothing to say
that big corporations with nasty behaviour have only one
lesson on licensing to teach.
Glen
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