*BSD News Article 33413


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From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Subject: Re: Legal status of NetBSD
Message-ID: <Ctp913.6Cn@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh
References: <310j8t$gl4@csugrad.cs.vt.edu> <310u0n$krt@rhombus.cs.jhu.edu> <3199ok$kq5@carroll1.cc.edu>
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 1994 11:24:39 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <3199ok$kq5@carroll1.cc.edu> sander@carroll1.cc.edu (Scott B. Anderson) writes:
>Novell (USG) and BSDI *DID* go to court, the ruling (uncontested
>by either side) was ...

How many times do I have to say this?

*There was no ruling.*

The case was settled out-of-court by an agreement between the parties.

>BSDI had to use BSD 4.4lite code and no code which ATT owned

BSDI *agreed* to switch to 4.4-lite, which they had planned to do
anyway!

There has been no court ruling on USL's claim.  The closest was the
judge's refusal to grant USL a preliminary injunction preventing BSDI
from distributing their system, indicating that USL had not shown
that there was a "reasonable probability of eventual success" for
their claim.

*My interpretation* of the settlement is that USL saw that they would
lose the case (and maybe even have it declared that they had no
copyright in 32V), but could have dragged it out indefinitely which
would have had bad consequences for BSDI.  As a face-saving measure
they agreed to drop the case immediately in return for insignificant
concessions from BSDI.  The outcome was an almost complete victory for
BSDI and UCB.

If you want to verify the facts, you can get the relevant documents
by anonymous ftp from macbeth.cogsci.ed.ac.uk in /pub/usl-vs-bsd, or
by WWW from http://macbeth.cogsci/pub/usl-vs-bsd.

-- Richard
-- 
Richard Tobin, HCRC, Edinburgh University                 R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk

Ooooh!  I didn't know we had a king.  I thought we were an
autonomous collective.