[SunRescue] Caldera owns Unix? WTF?

[BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

> Essentially an outfit called "The Open Group" owns the trademark "UNIX". How
> that came to be is a long convoluted tale that requires a Ross Perot chalk
> board demonstration. So if Caldera bought the Open Group, they would now own
> the trademark to UNIX.

> > 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.

Apparently SCO sold the entire SysV code to Caldera, a big Linux house.
Caldera also bought CP/M.  Caldera seems to be buying up all sorts of
OS's.

Anyway, OpenGroup aside (the tradmark is NOT where it's at, IMHO, but
the code IS), if Caldera owns the code, and is melding it with Linux
(``unifying'' is what they say in the blurb --- see the SCO lists for
particulars), then that leads to some mighty hot marriage beds with
open source Linux and closed source UNIX (Sco UNIX is UNIX, right?).
I sense there might be some fun in UNIX down the road, because of that,
IFF I am reading their hype, correctly.

> > They bought the product called Unix, and they can license it out to other
> vendors.

Is that what they really want to do?  There is no great market in 
that, really, IMHO, but there is a great opensource market if they
can find some way to inexpensively meld the open/closed together.
That might be were some fun may occur.

> > Sun doesn't need to pay, since they made a one-time perpetual license
> payment in the millions of dollars, IIRC (to SCO IIRC).

OK, no sweat.

> > 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).

Really?  If they OWN the code, they can do whatever they like with it,
including open it up.  There maybe be more to the ``unifying'' they
are talking about than meets the eye.  IFF they just sit on it and
try to license a shrinking market, that would be very expensive to
them in the long run. I hope that is not what they try to do with
it.  I sense it goes beyond that, but I am not sure yet, exactly
to where.  What if they brought the full unix code base into the
Linux kernel.  That would have a great bit of upsmanship in the
geek crowd, and could be used as good marketing in the commercial
crowd.  There is no need to sell licenses, anymore, but they could
make a longterm buck off services and ancillaries on top of the
basic UNIX framework.  I could be wrong, but I hope I am not.
Selling licenses won't compete in the freebie market and won't
compete against free Solaris.  Essentially giving it away and
marketing extras could compete, perhaps.

What I am curious about, and not clear on is if they got the
ancient UNIX stuff too.

Anyway, I think this might prove to be interesing to the UNIX
community (UNIX and Unix and unix and not offically branded
equivalents) in the long run.  Hopefully, it won't be another
who owns UNIX this year fiasco.

Good discussion.

Bob