Microsoft Probably Didn't Just Buy Unix

[sjinsjca]

From Slashdot:

"Word came down this morning that when Attachmate bought Novell, certain intellectual property rights were sold to a Microsoft-led consortium as part of the deal. Since Unix is the most valuable piece of IP Novell owns, there was a certain amount of panic that suddenly Redmond is in charge of this foundational technology for Linux and a number of other open source projects. But, while MS is being cagey, Brian Proffitt doubts that Unix was part of the IP package that was sold — and believes that Linux would be safe even if it were."

Hm. Depending on how this breaks, what impact might this have on the BSD world, including Apple?

 

[KnightWRX]

This has been proven fact that Microsoft did not acquire Unix. What Novell had of Unix was the copyrights for the SysV (Unix version 7) release and the licensing business for those copyrights. Microsoft acquired 882 patents from Novell yesterday :

http://www.infoworld.com/t/open-source-applications/microsoft-will-purchase-882-novell-patents-809

To answer your question, how would it have affected BSD ? Absolutely not at all. The early 90s judgement in USL vs BSD granted a perpetual license free of charge to the BSD guys. As for Apple, they do not use SysV code in their system, having OS X based on NeXT which uses Carnegie-Mellon's mach kernel and a BSD userland (with GNU thrown).

 

[*LTD*]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

Nothing. This had nothing to do with Apple, and a lot to do with taking Novell off the OS map. The repercussions of which have a lot more to do with Red Hat, Android, etc.