[Nottingham] Sun's financial support for SCO (12% of SCO's revenue)

[Robert Davies]

On Thursday 18 Sep 2003 09:59, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, Robert Davies wrote:
> > On Thursday 18 Sep 2003 08:57, Jon Masters wrote:
> > > On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Robert Postill wrote:
> > > The information I have suggests that the SCO deal relates purely to
> > > some drivers used in Solaris x86 probably because they needed them in a
> > > hurry.
> >
> > Jon, sorry for 2nd response, but what information?
>
> Mostly a collection of public documents and responses and the knowledge
> that the SunOS kernel is pretty much free from SCO licensing clutches.
>
> 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.

That close releationship with AT&T provoked the backlash, by other vendors, 
who didn't fancy a direct competitor having a privileged position with their 
main OS base supplier.   That ended up in OSF/1, alternative standards, for  
things like RPC (DCEE IIRC), and Motif the most successful OSF initiative.  
CDE was meant to heal things up, Sun always pick the wrong GUI system 
incidentally, will be interesting to see if GNOME is the exception to the 
rule.

The clean seperation of projects (and licenses) for kernel (Linux) and user 
space (GNU, BSD, X, ...), is  not a universal concept.  Look at BSD's which 
even today, bundle main user space tools and libraries with their kernels.  
It's more a consequence of Linus's distaste for unecessary extra work.  So 
there was no difference between kernel and user space licensing, just as in 
SVID, and Posix, includes user space tools, as well as system calls, and 
functions implemented by C library.

The kernel of SCO's argument, is that IBM breached contract, they claim that 
AIX developments like JFS are derivative of Unix, and therefore are covered 
by the confidentiality cause ie. that they cannot be open sourced.  You ought 
to be very concerned by Sun's involvment, if they follow that line of logic, 
they could never again make source licensing available for products like NFS 
to other vendors, nor established standards without SCO's cooperation.  The 
future would be closed source, and Sun's moves towards Open source would be a 
limitted sham.

Rob