UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc.

USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 by Unix System Laboratories against Berkeley Software Design, Inc and the Regents of the University of California over intellectual property related to UNIX. The case was settled out of court in 1993 after the judge expressed doubt in the validity of USL's intellectual property, with Novell (who by that time had bought USL) and BSDi agreeing not to litigate further over the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which would later develop into a range of BSD distributions, each tuned to its own specific audience's strengths and markets.

Background

The suit has its roots at the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, which had a license for the source code of UNIX from AT&T's Bell Labs. Students doing operating systems research at the CSRG modified and extended UNIX, and the CSRG made several releases of the modified operating system beginning in 1978, with AT&T's blessing. Because this Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) contained copyrighted AT&T UNIX source code it was only available to organizations with a source code license for UNIX from AT&T.