History lesson is a bit off
Under "History lessons" you postulate that "History might have been different had Sun open sourced Solaris sooner ...", following on from different recollections of Schwartz;
"In a 2003 interview ... Schwartz told eWeek that Sun paid AT&T to get rights equivalent to ownership ... We double-checked this with McNealy, and he is positive: there was an agreement with Novell in 1994. This would make more sense, given it was Novell that retained the Unix trademark"
Over at Groklaw the news picks editor noticed this article and Pamela Jones tartly pointed out that Schwartz and McNealy's are both right as far as it goes but both are confused. There was legally no choice here. There was a 1994 Novell deal but it merely removed royalty obligations. It still had confidentiality restrictions which did not permit Sun to open-source Solaris code. As Ms Jones puts it,
"If you read the appellate court's ruling in the first SCO v. Novell appeal, you'll find out precisely what happened. In 1994, Sun paid $83 million for buyout rights. But they still didn't have the right to open source the code. They got that right from the amendment to the 1994 deal in 2003, paying $9 million more".
The appeal in question is Case 08-4217 before Judge McConnell of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. On page 50 it says, as Ms Jones quotes:
"After entering into its 2003 agreement with SCO, Sun released an opensource version of Solaris that would have been barred under the 1994 agreement".
Poor McNealy. He couldn't have open-sourced it earlier without paying a whole swag of money and seems not to have realized that. How many times did he call Time Out on an exec who told him so?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
