The AT&T lawsuits for the Unix (c) infringement has been largely used as a FUD from both MS and GNU against open source.
It was fixed fast, but the PR standed long. (calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose)
The BSD community having been beaten early by the IP problems have been more cautious since this time whereas the linux (as an OS) community becoming an official UNIX (c)(tm) in 1997 as they became POSIX compliant and have been artificially protected from IP problems has been careless in disentangling itself from all the proprietary shit that IBM and other big company that wanted to kill the cost of maintaining their own OS have been putting in the OS. (the legal construct for protecting linux from patent/IP problems involves a lot of big companies and complex clauses).
POSIX may have follow IP protocol in the direction of bloatware specifications.
Linux without this compliance and the support of the big companies seeing it as a way to reduce their costs (RH/IBM/maya/Oracle) would not have been able to substitute itself to other proprietary UNIX in the realm of "professional IT". Especially because big vendors made a pax romana around linux concerning the claims of patents when contributing to the OS.
But by mimicking and being driven by normalization/fundations where the main stake holders are proprietary vendors (HW/SW...) linux has became something of a proprietary software itself.
(Just look at who are the main ISO/IETF/IEEE/POSIX contributors nowadays, and the member of OSI/linuxfundation.)
It was fixed fast, but the PR standed long. (calomniez, calomniez, il en restera toujours quelque chose)
The BSD community having been beaten early by the IP problems have been more cautious since this time whereas the linux (as an OS) community becoming an official UNIX (c)(tm) in 1997 as they became POSIX compliant and have been artificially protected from IP problems has been careless in disentangling itself from all the proprietary shit that IBM and other big company that wanted to kill the cost of maintaining their own OS have been putting in the OS. (the legal construct for protecting linux from patent/IP problems involves a lot of big companies and complex clauses).
POSIX may have follow IP protocol in the direction of bloatware specifications.
Linux without this compliance and the support of the big companies seeing it as a way to reduce their costs (RH/IBM/maya/Oracle) would not have been able to substitute itself to other proprietary UNIX in the realm of "professional IT". Especially because big vendors made a pax romana around linux concerning the claims of patents when contributing to the OS.
But by mimicking and being driven by normalization/fundations where the main stake holders are proprietary vendors (HW/SW...) linux has became something of a proprietary software itself.
(Just look at who are the main ISO/IETF/IEEE/POSIX contributors nowadays, and the member of OSI/linuxfundation.)
Those who controls the API controls the OS.