I never took those kinds of notes.  We certainly talked about it and we used to have know who had what at Locus since all of the majors were our customers and we had to be very, very careful to not cross pollinate.   Sometimes we would do specific work in different offices, just to make the firewall easier to manage.  For instance the Ultrix and Tru64 work we did for DEC, as well as the HP work was done in Boston.  Most of the IBM work was done in the LA office, and Intel work was led in San Diego.

There was a time when I had the release schedules of DEC, IBM, HP and Sun taped the wall behind my desk, because we had teams delivering things to all 4 of them.

That said, if you talked to one of the UNIX press of the old days, like the old "UNIXgram/X" folks, you could put together the chronology. However, I don't know that any of that is on line anywhere to search.   But that would be the documentation I would look if I was a lawyer trying to demonstrate who did what in what order.   Some of those folks are still around and writing, I saw something from Timothy Pickering Morgan just yesterday talking about Linux and I see some of the other names pop up in the blogs and journals at different times.

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 1:03 PM, Jacob Ritorto <jacob.ritorto@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
​HP/UX is an SVR3 & OSF/1 ancester.   Solaris is SVR4.  In fact it was the SVR4 license and deal between Sun and AT&T)​ that forced the whole OSF creation.  One of the "principles" of the OSF was "Fair and Stable" license terms.

Which begs a question - since Solaris was SVR4 based and was made freely available via OpenSolaris et al, does that not make SVR4 open?   I'm not a lawyer (nor play one on TV), but it does seem like that sets some sort of precedent.


I hope not to hijack the thread, but those are interesting tidbits of info, there, Clem.  Are these strategic license moves chronicled anywhere at the moment?  It'd be interesting to read exactly who sued whom, who asked for permission vs. who begged for forgiveness, etc.

thx
jake