[Nottingham] Sun's financial support for SCO (12% of SCO's
revenue)
Jon Masters
nottingham at mailman.lug.org.uk
Thu Sep 18 22:22:07 2003
On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Robert Davies wrote:
> > The userspace as was pointed out so rightly on Sheflug is not a rewrite
> > and does depend upon whatever current licensing covers SysV.
> > Personally I agree that Sun did this mostly to get themselves out of any
> > legal action involving systems running a Linux kernel with GNU software.
> Jon, Sun bought right to develop and distribute Solaris without further
> license fees. They combined with AT&T to produce SysV rel 4 which was meant
> to be the Grand Unification Release of Unix. They certainly did not start
> from scratch, and shared technology and code with AT&T on things like linking
> formats. Sun used to issue mucho PR on the advantages of their position,
> they certainly claimed enhancements, rather than the re-write from scratch
> you imply.
However the point of my post was that the kernel was pretty much done from
scratch for Solaris using the existing base as a starting point.
I tried to be specific in my implication that the userspace code was based
upon System V source however the Solaris kernel was a different story.
Jon.