The Free Unices

[Don Whiteside <dwhite@shadow.net>]

On Wed, 18 Oct 1995, ucklw08 wrote:

> as I undetstand it, their win in court only applied to BSDI Inc and
> did not clearly resolve the copyright issue for everyone else.  If
> you play with NetBSD, 386BSD source code that may be OK -- but if you
> market it AT&T's clients (sold to Novell?  resold to SCO?) may have
> a basis to come after you.  Linus owns linux outright.

You're thinking of 386BSD, a Bill Jolix creation/port under USL license. 
NetBSD and FreeBSD were both originally 'patches' to the code. However, 
with the court case FreeBSD and NetBSD moved to BSD 4.4-Lite and were 
barred from distributing the older code (you can still legally USE it, 
they just can't distribute it).

The 4.4-Lite code is very stable, and being maintained. People interested 
should go look at http://www.freebsd.org and read the 'about' and 
'history' bits. It is also resellable (if you choose to build upon it to 
resistribute), _unlike_ the Linux stuff which is under the GPL.