The root of the problem is that IBM took licensed code that was used under license from SCO for AIX and put it into the linux. BSD has been around for a longtime and is based upon on older type of UNIX. AT&T even licensed BSD at onetime, but they created it. Bell Labs was the one that invented UNIX and AT&T at onetime owned them.
http://www.getbsd.com/whatisbsd.php
"In the middle 1970s, around the time Version 6 was released, AT&T began to license its Unix operating system. At little or no cost, individuals and organizations could obtain the C source code. When the University of California at Berkeley received the source code, Unix co-creator Ken Thompson was there as visiting faculty. With his help, researchers and students, notably Sun co-founder Bill Joy, improved the code and developed the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Funded by a grant from DARPA, the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was the most important source of Unix development outside of Bell Labs. Along with AT&T's own System V, BSD became one of the two major Unix flavors."
"BSD stands for ``Berkeley Software Distribution''. It is the name of distributions of source code from the University of California, Berkeley, which were originally extensions to AT&T's Research UNIX operating system. Several open source operating system projects are based on a release of this source code known as 4.4BSD-Lite. In addition, they comprise a number of packages from other Open Source projects, including notably the GNU project."
"If we take a broad look at the BSD toolbox, we will find that there are five BSDs. In alphabetical order, they are: BSDI, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and PicoBSD. Even though they all have the same heritage, stemming from the University California Berkeley 4.4BSD and 386BSD source code, they have diverged and specialized."
As you can see, BSD is safe as long as they did not take linux code and put it into BSD. I have no idea why they would do that as they are different. BSD has been around longer then SCO, and SCO must accept previous licensing deal that AT&T/Bell Labs made.
Since The Open Group is diligent in their trademark, UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group. All other trademarks mentioned in my post belong to their respective companies/holders.
