[rescue] OS X is certified UNIX

[Michael-John Turner]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2007 at 03:57:36PM -0500, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> >> At one time a group of people working for AT&T Labs went through the
> >> "free" BSD code and compared it line for line looking for AT&T code.
> >> They found none, so BSD is not UNIX.
> 
> Uhm, that doesn't seem right (based on memory) - I thought the BSD
> softwarewas "tainted" to some small degree with AT&T code (remember, BSD
> started as an add-on pack for AT&T Unix on Vax & other architectures), so
> the co-mingling was (in a way) OK, because the BSD software wasn't usable
> without AT&T licensed software anyway... For way more info on BSD/AT&T
> history, see:
> 
> http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

I think what the original poster (Geoff Mendelson?) was referring to was
the AT&T USL lawsuit against the CSRG at UCB. After the release of the BSD
Net/2 release, which was the first that was almost a complete OS (compared
to the earlier releases, which were add-ons to AT&T Unix and required an
AT&T Unix source license to be useful), AT&T sued, claiming that they owned
much of the copyright to the source. The lawsuit was eventually settled,
with only three files being removed from Net/2 and some copyrights being
changed (IIRC). This led to 4.4BSDlite, which excluded the few encumbered
files. 

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner | http://mjturner.net/
mj at turner.org.za    | Open Source in WC ZA - http://www.clug.org.za/