UNIX in Trading
With the dismemberment of AT & T in 1984 in the famous seven Baby Bells, smaller companies that operate locally, free sharing of Unix ended. Only a few universities, like Berkeley, California, continued to develop their own version of Unix derivative. AT & T had resigned his position of market dominance and become a carrier for calls between states. The commercialization of Unix knew no barriers and therefore Unix System III (based on the seventh version) was the first release to be issued on payment of a price and without source code. Was followed a few years later the UNIX version of System V, which included support for other architectures and the integration of the vi editor, originally developed by the California branch of Unix, and BSD.
Other companies began to offer commercial versions of Unix. Some obtained a license to use the code by AT & T, others rely on the development branch created by the University of California, Berkeley. It was precisely from this derivation that Bill Joy created SunOS (now Solaris and OpenSolaris) and founded Sun Microsystems in 1982. Microsoft also had its own version of Unix, which he called XENIX, then acquired by SCO (Santa Cruz Operation). It was thanks to the SCO’s work to make it compatible with the Intel 386.
In 1984 came the first real standard Unix, or SVR4 System V Release 4, which contained all the innovations promoted by the various companies that had marketed so far as Sun Unix, BSD, SCO and IBM.
In 1993 AT & T decided to sell all rights to Unix from Novell, UnixWare with whom he created a system that integrates the technology behind NetWare. UnixWare then found himself having to compete against Microsoft Windows NT, but it is lacking a valid business support to the long lost the battle. In 1995, some development and marketing rights were distributed to the SCO. Do not know exactly what rights have been sold and the matter is now underpin today’s case that pits the two companies.
SCO’s lawsuit against Linux (year two thousand)
Initially, the SCO supported Linux distribution with its own and actively collaborated in order to make more palatable its Unix crushed by competition from Microsoft, did, however, that while the SCO lost sales due to an inadequate business support, small firms Linux grew tremendously. The growth of Linux caused many problems for SCO, which was crushed by the strong growth of Linux on one side and a sales force Microsoft hand. He decided to resort to legal action against IBM and other companies that used Linux heavily at the center of their business. The charges relate to alleged copyright violations in the Linux kernel, which means that parts of Linux, according to SCO, were copied from the kernel of Unix, which SCO claims to hold the rights.
In early 2007 SCO provided specific details of the alleged copyright violation. Unlike previous statements that saw SCO owns a million lines of code, they stated only 326 lines of code, most of which was not covered by copyright. In August 2007, the court in the Novell case settled, to begin , which SCO did not own either the copyright to Unix.
Curiously BSD also suffered a similar legal attack (relative to the neo-distribution BSD/386) by AT & T. The dispute ended in 1994, largely in favor of BSD, where, among 18,000 files, only 3 had to be removed from the system and 70 modified in terms of the license.
Unix and free software
In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU project to create a clone of Unix that was free software, which would guarantee full freedom of use and modification by users and developers, Unix subtracting the proprietary vendors. In 1991 the system was supplemented by the creation of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. The Unix world knew that a second youth. Currently systems based on GNU / Linux are the most used in the large family of Unix systems, especially in the server, but with increasing frequency and also on the netbook personal computer. Between 2007 and 2008 several manufacturers, including Dell, Asus, Lenovo, HP brought computers with Linux preinstalled to the general public to this system by opening the doors of personal computing. From 2009 are becoming mobile phones and PDAs based on Android, a version of GNU / Linux modified by Google to be extremely light.
The most important family of systems derived from Unix, but not certified as UNIX, is to BSD, which include FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, and many others.
Remember also that the family is the Unix operating system Minix.
There’s big difference between the statements UNIX, Unix and Unix-like:
- UNIX is a registered trademark and indicates an operating system certified by The Open Group, a consortium of companies including IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems. To be certified, the operating system must conform to specifications set by The Open Group itself;
- Unix-like (often abbreviated as * nix, though in common usage the latter term refers primarily BSD operating systems such as FreeBSD, which can use such information for historical reasons) indicates those operating systems that are designed according to specifications Unix systems, described in the Single UNIX Specification, but for legal reasons can not use the trademark UNIX;
- With Unix are generally given all the systems derived from UNIX from AT & T.
Study: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons.