SCO Unix Intellectual Property Pedigree Chart

[Rich Braun]

Jack Coats wrote:
> It got spun off with most of Bell Labs to Lucent, who sold off UNIX
> to someone else (I forget who), and from then it was purchased by SCO.

'Twas Novell, sometime around 1993.  That was the day I concluded Unix was
dead:  the only reason Novell would buy this intellectual property would be to
finish off a longtime competitor.

It basically worked, but for the fact that FreeBSD and Linux were both on
their ascent at a time that under-funded local ISPs came along with (a) the
need and (b) the expertise to cobble together PPP, Apache, SQL, POP3, and
various other services that Novell had yet to figure out.

Hmm, didn't HP buy Unix from Novell, and thence sell it to SCO?  Or did SCO
buy it directly from Novell, once it was good & dead?

In any event--SCO's contribution is clearly irrelevant.  If it weren't for
ignorant judges and courts, their current claims would be headed absolutely
nowhere.

The standard called "POSIX" is the one enduring standardized technology from
the Unix wars of the late 1980s.  Everything else was basically a dead-end
proprietary platform dressed up with a Unix-ish name, on which freeware like X
could emerge despite the best efforts of business execs to close their
platforms.

Today's Linux is not your father's Oldsmobile.  They don't make cars the way
they did in the 1980s, and that's a Good Thing, just as a modern O/S is a very
different beast than one of the same era.

-rich