USL v. BSDi
More info
- Parties
- Unix System Laboratories v. BSDi and the University of California
- Years
- 1992–1994
- Outcome
- Settled
The lawsuit over whether Berkeley's Unix still contained AT&T's code — which dragged on just long enough for Linux to get ahead.
Berkeley had released Net/2, a nearly complete BSD with the AT&T code rewritten. A company called BSDi sold a commercial system built on it, with the phone number 1-800-ITS-UNIX. In 1992 AT&T's subsidiary Unix System Laboratories sued both BSDi and the university. The university hit back by showing that AT&T had used Berkeley code without the required attribution.
After Novell bought USL, the case settled in January 1994. Of roughly 18,000 files, three were removed and about seventy modified; the result shipped as 4.4BSD-Lite. Meanwhile every BSD had lived under legal uncertainty for two years, and businesses picked Linux instead. FreeBSD had to rebuild its foundation from scratch.