My wife rousted me out of bed this morning waving a printout she had 
made of
a 'linux' news item. Since she now has that buzword in her mind, I get 
all
of these often useless news items.

But this one struck a cord. Apparently the inheritor of AT&T/Bell Labs
*nix has followed in the footsteps of AT&T and decided rather than
actually sell products, produce new wonderful solutions to
world hunger, and related problems, SCO has now gone in the
business of supporting an army of lawyers and is ferreting
out any residual AT&T code to be found in linux.

SCO as some historians will recall was once a going concern
producing a *nix port to x86's and as I recall either was the originator
of a MS *nix, or took it over.

Anyway, this news item recalled to my mind the AT&T battles with
UC Regents and in particular the 'unencombered' BSD code.

The rhetorical question I have, is it still the case that BSD in
any of its major 'free' version, that is NetBSD and FreeBSD
in any way beholding to AT&T in any way shape or form?

I'll now return you to your regularly schedule technical discussion...

John Clark

PS.
I've returned to the convention of refering to *nix with a star
rathe than refer to any MFSoB corporate entity's Registered
Trademark, or the like.

PPS. It is my belief that the AT&T suite is the very reason why
BSD is not the 'on the popular mind free OS', that it rightfully should
have been.

So the theory is if BSD is not in any way encombered, then perhaps
that would be a sales point for products based on the BSD's.