the corporate afterlife of an operating system that outgrew the company that owned it.
means a subsidiary at&t spun off to commercialize and license unix after realizing they had accidentally built the most important software of the century.
from born 1989 as at&t split its computer systems division, folding in the unix source and rights that bell labs researchers had built casually in 1969 to run a spare pdp-7; by the time lawyers noticed its value, it was already everywhere.
system v release 4 — 1989 unification of bsd, xenix, and sysv lineages
novell unixware — 1993 acquisition folded unix labs into novell
sco group lawsuit — 2003 suit against ibm over derivative code claims
open group trademark — unix name now certified, not owned, since 1996