Date: Sat, 6 Oct 2001 12:08:37 -0700 (PDT) From: Ed Alley <alley1@llnl.gov> To: grog@freebsd.org, tedm@toybox.placo.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <200110061908.f96J8b505038@jordan.llnl.gov>
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I looked through TOG web page and found their UNIX specification. Its clear to me that this whole thing is a morass that FreeBSD should not mess with. Ted is correct. Just get the FreeBSD page in compliance. We can't win against this kind of thing. FreeBSD must now beg the question as to what is meant by an OS that USED to be called UNIX. The Open Group is changing the meaning of UNIX before our eyes. Even so they are brain-dead about history and facts. Whenever I start my system the fortune program entertains me with something. The other day I got this: The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views ... which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. -- Doctor Who, "Face of Evil" To see how brain-dead they are I have extracted parts of a paragraph from their specification where they inadvertantly ADMIT that BSD is UNIX! (I have included the URL below). "When the survey was complete, ... blah blah ... Berkeley UNIX calls ... blah, blah, ... on BSD-derived platforms. Such things as sockets and the 4.3BSD memory management calls were commonly used ...." So they admit that BSD is UNIX. Ted is correct, The Open Group is only after money. I don't think that they are clueless though; I think that they know exactly what they are doing: They are protecting what they view as their property. They are also in a very powerful legal position. The problem goes back to ATT. The name "UNIX" for all of us meant how an OS operated or behaved. However, to Bell Labs UNIX is a trademark. Somewhere along the way ATT saw that they could make money off of the name (they were in trouble anyway) and that's where the problems began. Books like Kernigan and Pike's "The UNIX Programming Environment" had the warning on the inside of the front cover: UNIX is a trademark of Bell Laboratories. Even the classic K/R: "The C Programming Language" tells us "UNIX is a registered trademark of AT&T". So ATT looked at the name "UNIX" as their property (like a phone or something), but most of us thought of it as a process or a way of working. The Opengroup UNIX specification web page: http://www.unix-systems.org/what_is_unix/single_unix_specification.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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