>Is it that simple? > >Sun paid money to SCO to license IP (of some form) relating to Unix - >why would they do that if they already owned the rights to it?
At the time this was said to be a license for "(Intel) specific device drivers". >Since SCO had no right to enter into the deal, and had no authority to assign >rights, wouldn't that essentially invalidate the deal -and therefore leave Sun >as vulnerable as they were before the made that agreement -maybe even more so >now >that they've distributed code that they potentially may not even have the >rights >to? A long time ago Sun paid a handsoem amount ($100-$200M) to AT&T for "full and perpetual rights to SVR4" so that Sun would never have to pay AT&T or the next owners a license free ever again. (This was many, many years ago). SCO bought Unixware from Novell and was well in its rights to license parts to it to other parties; however, the Unixware deal included the requirement for SCO to pay royalties to Novell (capped at a certain amount [per annum?]) and it seems that they did not do that for the Microsoft and Sun license agreements. The SCO deal predates OpenSolaris by many years and had nothing to do with it; it's the older deal which allows Sun to open source Solaris insofar we did not write the code ourselves. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
