Forums | MacLife

They wont succed, it too late.

The license had been signed and confirmed, there is no turning back.

W

Uh no. That is not what they want. They have UNIX IP property that covers a few things. They are saying that they believe many OSes are using that IP outside the guides of a Licensing agreement. And they maybe correct, then again they may not be. The whole thing will get rather complicated quite quickly.

Anything a programmer has done that doesn't touch the kernel is most likely completely safe from this.

As far as I know Boies has made a career out of losing high profile cases.

Why is this worse than Apple going cease and desist crazy on anyone they want to, wether it would hold up in court or not?

There are two things that trouble me with this one.  1:  patents don't last 34 years, even after you've extended them.  2:  If you fail to enforce your intellectual property rights, you lose it.  That is, if you patent something and get ripped off, you better make them stop or your patent is null.

i read a book about apple's history once and it gave a reason for Bill being able to use the gui. the current ceo, i think it was skully(sp?), GAVE bill a license to imitate the mac gui in all current and future versions of windows. that was a bomb shell in court. i might be slightly off there somewhere but that is basically it, as the book read. so if microshaft ever changes the name of their crappy os to anything other than windows.... does this mean apple can open up a whoop ass shop on them? i sure hope so.

Pffft.

Sculley was there from almost the beginning, he was certainly there before the Macintosh.

Microsoft was awarded a license for a GUI from Apple, that was the main thing which led to Apple losing the court case against them in the end.

Oh, and Apple paid Xerox for the right to base works off the Alto/Star GUI.

Thats not what happend, if you watch Pirates of silicon valley they clearly point out that Gates stole the GUI.I don't know if it happened as they say but it was stolen.  Jobs was still the CEO and Gates came to him and asked if he could write software for them, at the time the Lisa was the only GUI computer for sale, Jobs said he could but he gave him 4 of the Mac Prototypes. soon there after he wipped together a GUI for DOS because he was still incompatent of writing an OS.  He got windows out well before the mac but it was a slapped together thing.

To bad the Woz was not still there, he would have set Jobs straight.....

Skully (SP? i don't know either) came well after this closer to 95.

I thought the macintosh came out in 1984?

Windows 1.0 wasn't released until 1985.

Its been almost 20 years since all of this happened. My how time flies.

-=Jax=-

"Pirates of Silicon Valley" is not what I'd call a definitive reference. It takes major liberties with the facts. "Based upon actual events" would be about right.

I sure hope BSD is beyond the reach of SCO. I wouldn't want to pay them any royalties.

My understanding of this SCO case is that their patents cover some versions of Unix, but not BSD Unix (which is the basis for NeXT and therefore OS X).

It's a bit different from Apple's cease and desist letters, as Apple continually enforces their copyrights (ie they are not allowed to lapse through neglect). SCO haven't been heard of for years, and have popped up to sue everyone they can see. In their case, even aside from the potential code issue, they've not been enforcing their copyright, so it could be argued that they'd allowed it to lapse.

Yeah, SCO holds *all* IP for Sys-V unix, which is to say the Bell Labs unix, not the Berkley unix.  All BSDs are immune from SCO licensing.  Unfortunately, the rise of free software doesn't bite MS, it bites the other *nix companies.

It was rumored a few weeks ago that SCO was going to require a per-CPU license to be paid by all Linux end users.  I didn't see any licensing rumbling in that article at all, just a bunch of smoke blown up my butt about SCO hiring David Boies, and a relatively stupid description of SCO's IP.