Hi, Actually, in the Open Source book by O' Reilly, Linus himself answers this question : all other variants of UNIX were actually derived from the AT&T and (eventually) BSD source code. Linux was written from scratch and is not based off of the AT&T or BSD sources. So Linux is really a UNIX like OS (because it does have the same architecture) but is not a UNIX variant.
Regards, Jor-el On Tue, 8 Jun 1999, Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo wrote: > On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Alisdair McDiarmid wrote: > > > > Mark Wright writes: > > > > Did someone register FreeBSD? If you check out FreeBSD.org, they say > > > > "FreeBSD is an advanced BSD UNIX operating system". > > > > > > They don't need anyone's permission to call FreeBSD UNIX. They aren't > > > selling it. > > > > I don't think that's anything to do with it. BSD UNIX *is* a UNIX > > operating system (Berkeley Standard Derivation or somthing), so it > > is within its rights to call itself UNIX. > > Not really. It /is/ BSD, which is directly derived from AT&T UNIX. > However, UNIX is a trademark which an operating system must be branded > with. It involves testing with The Open Group and paying a lot of money to > them for the right to use the name. I tend to refer to *BSD, as well as > commercial Unices, as GNU-like operating systems, while GNU/Linux and (of > course) GNU/HURD are GNU operating systems. Noone owns a trademark on the > term GNU, and anyone but RMS and the FSF would have a rather difficult > time trying to get one, so it should be quite all right to call such > things GNU-like operating systems, rather than labelling them UNIX-like. > > > -- > Jakob 'sparky' Kaivo - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.ndn.net/ > "As time goes on, my signature gets shorter and shorter..." - me > > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null > >