DOS code in CP/M? Revisited...

[Fred Cisin]

>> CP/M rights later passed through to Corel and Caldera.

On Thu, 14 Jul 2016, Swift Griggs wrote:
> I have some foggy memory of Caldera using the "Digital Research" name, at
> least internally and on some documents. However, it's been a long time and
> the SCO-connected legacy left a terrible taste.
> You know the history well, obviously, after reading your post. Do you

Not very.  Just current events during my time.
I was never an important participant.  But, I was there.

> happen to know if the "Digital Research" you mention and the use of the
> name by Caldera were related to the same original entity? IIRC, I could be
> wrong but I even seem to remember downloading "DR-DOS" from Caldera before
> FreeDOS was fully baked to get a hold of nice free-as-in-beer version of
> DOS...

Yes.  Novell acquired the remains of DRI in 1991?
They sold DR-DOS as "Novell DOS"
Caldera was formed a few years later by some Novell people.

(The Caldera V Microsoft lawsuit was not about copyright; it was 
complaining about dirty dealings by Microsoft, such as putting unnecessary 
code into Windoze 3.1 to make it refuse to run under DR-DOS. There was a 
settlement in 2000? that was believed to be about $250M)

Caldera begat Lineo,

Lineo begat DRDOS, Inc.

DRDOS, Inc. is apparently for sale for $25K.
If you have any expectations of being sued by Microsoft for writing 
anything that resembles any of their stuff, it could be cheap legal 
insurance.   (Adam Osborne was too slow about buying Visicalc debris)
When a company folds, the IP rights may end up with multiple people, 
either in dispute, or simply non-exclusively owned by more then one. 
Hence, Novell could spin off CP/M, without giving up their joint ownership 
of IP rights as protection against Microsoft.


> but it could just be the drugs.
Could be.