Microsoft Tight-Lipped On Unix Ownership Question

From article:

Quoting:If you follow the tangled history of Xenix, it seems that there were opportunities for parts of that operating system to make its way into other Unix variants, and potentially into Linux. Microsoft's primary partner in bringing Xenix to market was Santa Cruz Operation (the original SCO, not SCO Group, which came later)...

SCO released their own linux distribution after this, so if there was any of the Xenix IP in it, or if they added it, those patents wouldn't matter because the patent holder at the time put them in, or approved of them being in.

How does the Univ of California/AT&T settlement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi) play into this? It seems that BSD-related code has a non-System-V origin (via 32V Unix), but still... One looks like SCOX might have found BSD-like code in Linux, and started their suits based on that non-similarity.

It strikes me that if/when MSFT sues someone over this, the defense should insist on specific lines in specific versions of files matching exactly.

I also vaguely recall someone (the original SCO, or maybe even Sun Microsystems) going to trial to *remove* a small piece of Xenix code from System V. The code was contractually required to appear in anything labeled "System V" if I recall, but wasn't actually used at the time of the suit. I can't find anything in Google, however.

There is so much unix code in so many places owned by who knows how many people, much if it no one is really sure what parts they actually own. That if MS ever actually take this to court, it will be a long ugly battle, that will probably kill most proprietary software.