Microsoft buys Unix license

The Wall Street Journal [paid sub required] reports that Microsoft has bought a Unix license from SCO. "A Microsoft spokeswoman ... said it opted to buy a license from SCO to make sure its products can exchange data with Unix software without violating any patents." SCO has sued IBM for $1 billion and last week (below) dropped Linux on the grounds that it infringes Unix intellectual property rights. Comment: Microsoft and SCO go back a long way, and Microsoft used to have a shareholding in the company, so it probably got a good deal. Almost 20 years ago, Microsoft sold its own version of Unix, called Xenix, under license from AT&T. But Unix was seen as too hard to use, and too insecure, for serious commercial use. SCO licensed and sold it as SCO Xenix. Eventually,SCO got hold of the original Unix, which came from AT&T via Novell. That's why SCO is now based in Utah instead of Santa Cruz, California. Trivia point: Back in 1984, when I was editor of Practical Computing magazine, we had to upgrade our office IBM PC/XT to get Xenix to run. The 10 megabyte hard drive was OK but I added half a megabyte of memory. This came from IBM as 18 chips at a cost of £999.