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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!news.ans.net!cmcl2!admii!smoke!gwyn From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: UNIX trademark (was: Re: 4.4BSD Release) Message-ID: <20273@smoke.brl.mil> Date: 7 Jul 93 16:01:48 GMT References: <JGREELY.93Jul6170732@morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu>> <MIB.93Jul6194230@geech.gnu.ai.m <C9rv16.F1q@rahul.net> Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Lab, APG MD. Lines: 50 In article <C9rv16.F1q@rahul.net> dhesi@rahul.net (Rahul Dhesi) writes: >Michael, sorry to be so blunt, but you are very confused. You are >confusing between the generic term UNIX, which is descriptive and >refers to a broad class of operating systems, and the specific term >UNIX, which refers to products from AT&T and USL. Saying so doesn't make it so. It has been very clear all along to anyone who paid attention that "UNIX" was not only a registered trademark (of Bell Labs, AT&T, USL, or whatever) but also that licensing was required to use the product, and UNIX source licensing has always involved a contract to protect the proprietary interests of the producer. Bell/AT&T/USL lawyers frequently contacted people who neglected to properly credit "UNIX" as a trademark. I've been riding herd over the vast array of BRL/APG UNIX licenses for several years; we are one of the largest "end user" (as opposed to VAR) licensees of UNIX and related software. And in order to acquire source to Irix and SunOS we've had to exhibit our source license(s) for UNIX. The fact is, trademarked/licensed UNIX (in any of its several varieties) has served as the base for the majority of UNIX look- alikes, which have "added value" (usually in the form of vendor- specific extensions) to the official UNIX release. There have been some notable exceptions, the first being Idris and later Coherent. I can't attest to "4.4BSD-lite", but previous releases of BSD have definitely been derived from the licensed UNIX product. Independently developed systems like Coherent have typically been engineered to provide interfaces compatible with those documented in the (publicly available) UNIX reference manuals; this made sense so long as it was UNIX functionality that customers wanted, not necessarily the official UNIX software release itself. There was one important reason why one might want an official UNIX-derived product, namely to track the official product as it evolved. The divergence of the BSD variants from the official version of UNIX caused untold porting difficulty and unnecessary expense; as of SVR4 all three major UNIX variants (Xenix, BSD, and official UNIX) were merged into one product, which was a significant achievement. (Then OSF started another variant, alas. Fortunately OSF's AES has been tracking POSIX, SVID, and XPG amazingly closely, so there hasn't been another big porting problem so far.) Products that are built to emulate UNIX but are not based on the licensed UNIX system software itself should be called "UNIX clones" or "UNIX look-alikes", not simply "UNIX" which is a trademark. Just as Scott facial tissues should not be called "Kleenex" and Pepsi- Cola should not be called "Coke".