Industry

MSFT buys UNIX?

Think again, oh Writer of Headlines. Dow Jones reports that Microsoft will buy UNIX from SCO — or at least their headline reports that. The body of the story is more accurate.

Microsoft has licensed the patents and source code; that is, they leased the property. This is quite a different beast from buying UNIX. Caldera bought UNIX, excepting the trademark, when it bought most of the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).

The amusing bit about this is that Microsoft is licensing code which includes some derived from Xenix, which it recently stopped licensing to SCO.

12:16:58 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry