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

[Jon Masters]

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.