Posted 10:41 PM

Everybody, it seems, owns a piece of Unix

The Open Group asserts ownership of UNIX trademark which it does, indeed, own. A quick check via the wikipedia shows that:

"UNIX was split into three parts upon leaving Novell. The UNIX trademark was transferred to an industry consortium, the X/Open group, (now just The Open Group) for certifying UNIX implementations as standard. The source base was sold to Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) who sold SVR4 on Intel hardware alongside their traditional Xenix-like SCO-UNIX offering. Hewlett-Packard got the operating system laboratory, which became mired in internal politics when asked to design the eventual replacement for HP's UNIX, HP-UX. Eventually the remaining employees were absorbed into the broader HP Corporation."

The Open Group isn't taking sides in the SCO-IBM battle, just asserting its ownership of the name and the certification process. If Microsoft, IBM, the Open Group and SCO's Darl MacBride are all involved the level of FUD is sure to keep rising.

And, just in case the waters weren't muddy enough already, The Free Software Foundation, maintainers of the GNU Open License, maintain that once SCO distributed the Linux kernel that any SCO-owned intellectual property was placed into the public domain according to the terms of GNU. So now FSF chairman Richard Stallman is also involved - not only is it FUDdier, we're approaching the FUDdiest grouping in history!