The suit claimed that the
software was written using trade secrets taken from AT&T??™s UNIX system.
It??™s important to note here that BSD developers had completely rewritten the copyright-protected
code from AT&T. Copyright was the primary means AT&T used to protect its rights to the UNIX
code. Some believe that if AT&T had patented the concepts covered in that code, there might not
be a Linux (or any UNIX clone) operating system today.
The lawsuit was dropped when Novell bought UNIX System Laboratories from AT&T in 1994. But,
during that critical time period, there was enough fear and doubt about the legality of the BSD
code that the momentum BSD had gained to that point in the fledgling open source community
was lost. Many people started looking for another open source alternative. The time was ripe for a
college student from Finland who was working on his own kernel.
Today, BSD versions are available from three projects: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
People generally characterize FreeBSD as the easiest to use, NetBSD as available on the
most computer hardware platforms, and OpenBSD as fanatically secure. Many security-minded individuals
still prefer BSD over Linux.
Linus Builds the Missing Piece
Linus Torvalds started work on Linux in 1991, while he was a student at the University of Helsinki,
Finland.
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