A rather misleading statement put out by AT&T Co at the European Unix User Show caused a flurry before the company denied that there was any change in its licensing policy. The statement seemed to imply that the company was planning to license binary implementations of Unix V Release 3.2 for the 80386 as a separate product carrying a per-copy royalty schedule. Such a move, which would have been directed to the newly merged Unix-Xenix operating system, would have placed AT&T in direct competition with current source code licensees such as Microport Systems, Santa Cruz Operation and Interactive Systems Corp. The spokesman said AT&T would be selling a binary version for its own 6386 workstation when the operating system is released in mid-August. In order to protect the Unix trademark, AT&T will offer licensees an obligatory foundation set, including base system, editing package, network support facility, Remote File Sharing, security administration and the 2Kb file system; outside of this restriction, vendors will be free to change the system.
