Apple being sued over use of Unix name

[wilburpan]

In this article from Business Week there are details on a lawsuit brought against Apple by The Open Group, who claims ownership over of the Unix name, because Apple has been using the term Unix in conjunction with OS X without a license. Apparently, they are most worked up over this page on the Apple website which explains the underpinnings of OS X.

I'm providing this as a public service just in case you were looking for an example of something more stupid than the last boneheaded thing that you saw.

 

[Sun Baked]

Yawn, nothing new in this December 2001 news and it's already been posted.

Check out http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/06/12/HNappleunixsuit_1.html

In their filing this week Apple and X/Open Company jointly requested that dates set by the court in February be extended. The two companies have reached a resolution to the main areas of dispute during settlement negotiations, but will need until July 18 to complete the documentation and other research that is needed, they said in the joint filing.

They have therefore asked that the fact discovery cut-off date be moved from June 6 to Aug. 29, with a pretrial conference on Jan. 22 and the jury trial to be moved from Dec. 15 to Feb. 9, 2004. District Judge Ronald M Whyte granted the request and ordered that the schedule for the case be modified.

 

[tjwett]

uh, am i on glue or isn't UNIX open source? doesn't something like this pretty much go against everything that Open Group is supposed to stand for? they should be kissing Apple's ass for taking the OS to such great places and taking it to the public mass. i guess everyone gets greedy at some point.

 

[yzedf]

Linux is open source. BSD is open source too. Different license, but same basic idea.

UNIX is not. UNIX was originally a AT&T product, but the name and rights have been sold a few times. Currently SCO owns the rights to UNIX.

Linux and BSD are not UNIX, but UNIX-like.

 

[tjwett]

Originally posted by yzedf
Linux is open source. BSD is open source too. Different license, but same basic idea.

UNIX is not. UNIX was originally a AT&T product, but the name and rights have been sold a few times. Currently SCO owns the rights to UNIX.

Linux and BSD are not UNIX, but UNIX-like.

thanks for correcting me. i thought ALL the "NIX" operating systems were open. good to know. still, it sucks and Apple are responsible for spreading UNIX further than it's ever been and they should be psyched. maybe they are entitled to compensation but it shouldn't get ugly.

 

[MacCoaster]

Originally posted by tjwett
thanks for correcting me. i thought ALL the "NIX" operating systems were open. good to know. still, it sucks and Apple are responsible for spreading UNIX further than it's ever been and they should be psyched. maybe they are entitled to compensation but it shouldn't get ugly.

They all used to be open, actually. AT&T UNIX's source code was widely available for Universities to improve upon (cough, hence BSD!). But when UNIX got popular in the microcomputer world, AT&T decided to close it up and make it proprietary then licensed it to other vendors, including Microsoft (XENIX) which was later sold to SCO.

 

[shadowfax]

from what i have heard, getting those old UNIX operating systems is/was extremely expensive, too.

 

[BaghdadBob]

It was my understanding from way back when OSX was vapor that Apple owned a slice of UNIX anyway. Am I wrong?