Ah, the games lawyers play. The more I read about this, the more I think it's some sort of turn-based strategy game that legal counsel for all parties involved decided to play. Winner gets 1.2 billion dollars!
Hehe, I wonder if GPL holds any water in court.
They should just switch to Windows!!! or Macs, but I think Macs might have unix code in it's kernel ...
Also on topic of OSes, isn't Mac owned by microsoft now? so why are people still arguing over that?
Ah, the games lawyers play. The more I read about this, the more I think it's some sort of turn-based strategy game that legal counsel for all parties involved decided to play. Winner gets 1.2 billion dollars!
Hehe, I wonder if GPL holds any water in court.
They should just switch to Windows!!! or Macs, but I think Macs might have unix code in it's kernel ...
Also on topic of OSes, isn't Mac owned by microsoft now? so why are people still arguing over that?
Huh? Do you means in the sense that "i OWN j00!"? Or something else?
Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple 4 or 5 years ago to keep them afloat, and ported IE and Office to Mac. Apple's been doing pretty good recently on the strength of their consumer electronics business: iPods and iTunes music store, especially, and certainly isn't owned by MS.
OS X uses FreeBSD as its base, with a heavily modified NeXT Step as the window manager (i.e. Aqua). OS X is POSIX compliant, last I heard.
Berkeley grad students and professors spent a lot of time writing UNIX utilities and OS crap. Their set of programs and patches were widely distributed under the name Berkeley Source Distribution. Eventually they got a kernel up and running and a lot of people using AT&T's original UNIX were using some or all of the BSD. There was a whole court battle in which AT&T claimed they owned all the BSD, since it was based on their UNIX junk. Berkeley actually won the case by proving that the code was really owned by the community of which Berkeley was the preeminent member. From then on, they distributed BSD freely as a complete OS, which it had already become. FreeBSD split into NetBSD, which aims to recreate the bazaar-style development of Linux, and OpenBSD, which aims to be a minimal, ultra-secure OS. Still, FreeBSD is around and has been ported to multiple architectures.
BSD development is characterized by a few academics and a board of volunteers handling all aspects of development, rather than Linux-style where everyone is expected to contribute. I think this is the main reason BSD hasn't got the publicity Linux has, because they control who is working on it. But, on the other hand, the BSD implementation of TCP/IP is the canonical example which everyone uses as part of their OS.
The BSD license is practically public domain and has very few restrictions compared to the GPL. All you have to do is admit you used BSD-licensed code when you used it; you don't have to provide the source or nothing.