Quote:
Originally Posted by nilsgecko
It's in its history that BSD went through a lot of legal problems of its own with AT&T, which resulted i(as I recall) in the rewrite of the Unix system to 4.4 BSD-Lite.
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This was a
copyright issue,
not a patent issue. Although they both deal with intellectual property, these are very different concepts.
You are right that 4.4BSD-Lite was the version without the code that AT&T claimed copyright to, but this was far from a complete rewrite. From memory it was 4 header files or something in that order.
It also wasn't quite “a lot of legal problems”, it was “only” one lawsuit…
Looking back, it was a silly lawsuit where no party actually gained anything and only damaged the reputation and perception of BSD, AT&T, and UNIX in general.