Microsoft copyrights in Unix (tm)source code

dubhthach

With the whole open sourcing of Solaris codebase (opensolaris) they got a nice little web interface to do string searchs of their code. Interesting to see all the Microsoft copyrights, after all most people forget that once upon a time the Unix with the largest install base was "Microsoft Xenix"

http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/search?q=%22Microsoft+Corporation%22&defs=&refs=&path=&hist=

Khannie

dubhthach wrote:

most people forget that once upon a time the Unix with the largest install base was "Microsoft Xenix"

:O

Is that true? Never even heard of it.

Amazed to see all the references, especially in everyday tools. How is there microsoft copyrighted code in solaris though?

Edit: Just looked at the grep source code. It's very well written. Commented well too. Particularly impressed with the command line argument parsing codes simplicity.

dubhthach

Khannie wrote:

:O

Is that true? Never even heard of it.

Amazed to see all the references, especially in everyday tools. How is there microsoft copyrighted code in solaris though?

Edit: Just looked at the grep source code. It's very well written. Commented well too. Particularly impressed with the command line argument parsing codes simplicity.

Indeed Microsoft licenesed Version 7 unix from AT&T in 1979 back when they were just a company writing Basic for different computers. This they called Xenix (couldn't use unix due to copyright) they then would relience their code onto different companies who would port it to different machines. One of these companies was the Santa Cruz Operation (aka SCO). Microsoft would eventually sell Xenix fully to SCO (this is the old SCO not the same as "SCO" doing the case against IBM) in the late 80's when they abdonded Unix for what was going to be "next big thing" (ie. OS/2 - We all know how that ended up).

As regards how Microsoft copyrights are in Solaris code, that's simple enough. As microsoft were a Unix licensee of AT&T they would often hand back patches (including copyright of said code) to AT&T.

Now Unix SystemVR4 (released all way back in 1988) was the merger of the AT&T codebase (SysVR3) and BSD codebase (via SunOS) as well as stuff from Xenix codebase.

Solaris is a SysVR4 Unix with a extra 17years of Sun development work on it. Of course the things like the basic utilities would have seen the lest new code over the years (apart from bug fixes and any extra functionality). I know that there is at least one Solaris source file that has a number of Comments in it from Version 6 Unix (1976)!!!!

From what i heard all the backend stuff in Redmond (Microsoft HQ) up until about 1992 was running on Xenix (on Vax hardware). That and everybody from clerical staff all way up to Bill Gates had to know how to use Vi if they wanted to go on holidays (they had to log in via terminal and enter their holidays by editing the relevant file with Vi)!