The Real UNIX? (was: The Unix Haters Handbook)

[Nikolas Britton]

On 6/4/06, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Sunday,  4 June 2006 at  9:35:47 +0200, Dag-Erling Smrgrav wrote:
> > Allen <slackwarewolf at comcast.net> writes:
> >> Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> writes:
> >>> Allen <slackwarewolf at comcast.net> writes:
> >>>> Technically FreeBSD has more right than SCO UNIX to be called UNIX
> >>> No.  Unlike FreeBSD, SCO UnixWare is a direct descendent of the
> >>> original AT&T Unix.
> >>
> >> So is / was Free BSD. That's why AT&T sued.
> >
> > It's not quite that simple.  Even at the time of the lawsuit, BSD had
> > very little AT&T code in it, and the lawsuit was sparked primarily by
> > BSDI's unauthorized use of the Unix trademark.  Read this:
> >
> > http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html
>
> There's a difference between technical and commercial rights.  Allen
> was referring to the technical issues.
>
> How much code is in the source base is one issue, but I don't know if
> I'd call it technical.  During the attack on IBM, SCO accidentally
> revealed that the base System V malloc is still the same as the
> Seventh Edition malloc (something so horrible that BSD rewrote it
> decades ago, and Linux people threw it out for ugliness without
> knowing the origin).
>
> But is that the technical aspect we mean?  Throughout the 1980s System
> V borrowed heavily from 4.[23]BSD.  The Eighth Edition of Research
> UNIX was derived from 4.1cBSD.  From that perspective, I'd really be
> inclined to think that BSD has more claim to be the real UNIX than
> Missed'em V has.
>

How much would it take to get The Open Group to re-certify FreeBSD as
UNIX and what would it take for FreeBSD to meet the requirements for
UNIX certification, and would it be beneficial to FreeBSD if this
happened?



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