[SunRescue] Caldera owns Unix? WTF?

[Chris Byrne]

No, unfortunately UNIX was originally a trademark owned by AT&T. They
started enforcing the mark long before it became generic, and then assigned
it to the Open Systems group who has continued HIGHLY selective enforcement
action against anyone using the trademark. The open systems group actually
has control of the trademeark "UNIX".

What caldera bought was the intellectual property rights to all original
AT&T UNIX codebase, as well as any code derived from it etc... etc... etc...

They are also legally obligated to continue any existing and enforcable
licensing agreemnts that AT&T (and later SCO) made with respect to the UNIX
codebase. This includes the SysV elements of Solaris. If you look through
much Solaris source code, and documentation you will often see something
like "licensed from AT&T corporation" and/or other legalese.


Chris Byrne

-----Original Message-----
From: rescue-admin at sunhelp.org [mailto:rescue-admin at sunhelp.org]On
Behalf Of Kevin Loch
Sent: 17 May 2001 20:17
To: rescue at sunhelp.org
Subject: Re: [SunRescue] Caldera owns Unix? WTF?


Isn't "Unix" such a common generic term that it is unenforcable
as a trademark?  If there ever was another "Kleenex", "Unix" has to
be it.

KL

Ken Hansen wrote:
>
> Bob,
> I am not aware of what you are talking about, but I assume that Caldera
bought the part of SCO that used to be the part of Novell, that used to be
the part of AT&T that was developing Unix. Is this what happened? If so, no
biggie, IMHO.
>
> They bought the product called Unix, and they can license it out to other
vendors.
>
> Sun doesn't need to pay, since they made a one-time perpetual license
payment in the millions of dollars, IIRC (to SCO IIRC).
>
> Owning Unix doesn't really allow them to do anything other than charge
license fees, oh and control the definition of what is (and is not) Unix. I
think their interest lies solely in th eformer, not the latter (they want
the revenue, not the control).
>
> Just my $.02,
>
> Ken
>
> Original post:
>
>         For the sake of discussion, anyone care to comment on
>         the recent Caldera takeover of UNIX?  Caldera is a big
>         Linux house, too. I sense a marriage of the two, which
>         could affect a lot of UNIX down the road, if I am
>         reading things correctly.
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