> I wonder about this. As far as I know, under a previous ruling in court with
> the original SCO company, Microsoft can't get into the UNIX business.

Presumably that had to do with the removal of the M$ copyright code
from UnixWare and the corresponding M$ copyright notice that used to
be output on every system boot.

The only useful stuff that got removed (the XENIX compatibility stuff)
was the 'hd' (aka hexdump) program, and some of the support for dos
filesystems (but not the fs code itself).

Any patents on Unix itself are likely to have long since expired.
Even anything from the days of the SVR4 merge is likely to expire soon.
So most of the AT&T patents will be gone, I doubt as either Novell
or SCO put much that might be (sensibly) patentable into the kernel.

Copyright is a different matter - but the specification for unix is
owned by TOG.

	David

-- 
David Laight: david@l8s.co.uk