I remain amazed this is totally forgotten. Even for the people in their mid-twenties now, this was THE news when most of those folks were probably first discovering Linux and computers.
I mean, yes, it got lots of press coverage, but nobody involved in the industry thought it really had any merit. In other words, nobody I ever heard of thought that there was any AT&T code in Linux.
For those outside of the industry, well, it may have seemed possible, and to those who don't know anything about computer program code, it would not be apparent that:
• it's hard to check;
• the volume of code involved is vast;
• it's hard to prove because different people often implement the same things the same way.
But to those in the trade, it was manifestly obvious it was false, but it would be a lot of slow, expensive work to prove it was false.
Whereas the MS thing is different.
There are only so many GUI designs in the world, and to those of us who used this stuff in the 1980s, paid some attention, and remember, it's easy.
Early 1980s GUIs were wildly diverse. Some had menus at the top of the screen, some at the side, some inside windows, some only appearing when you clicked. Of the ones that were on demand, some were a list, some were pie-shaped, etc.
Some OSes put drives on the desktop, some in a folder, some didn't show them.
Some had app launchers, some didn't and you used the file manager to find binaries and run them directly.
Some had a clock, some didn't, some it was optional. Some it was on the desktop, some it was in a window, some it was in a menu somewhere.
Some multitasked, some didn't. Of the ones that did, some had app switching tools of some form, such as a window of app icons, or a list, or a menu. Some had no graphical switcher at all: if you want a window, then click on it. Can't see it? That's your problem. Go find it.
Some kept files on the desktop. Some kept minimised windows on the desktop. Some kept a mixture. Some didn't use the desktop directly. Some didn't have any desktop metaphor at all. Some you couldn't see it.
The point being that there was almost no standardisation and nobody much felt that was missing or wanted. It was just how things were. For some this was a reason to prefer one vendor's offerings over another.
Then OS/2 1.1 and later set a look and feel that others copied: Microsoft in Windows 3, and Motif on Unix. CDE and other Unix "desktops" took some parts of it. OS/2 3 took some of CDE, and so on.
Then Windows 95 came along, and it was pretty good. It had a visual app launcher, as standard. Nothing else had one front and centre like that. It had a visual app switcher, again front and centre. It had a click and a standardised way to show system status icons.
It was for its time extremely good. Amazingly good, and it hurt OS/2 and classic MacOS.
MacOS 8 and 9 picked up some features. Small stuff: arrows on the corner of "aliases" (its version of "shortcuts", which were Microsoft's visible version of Unix symlinks -- something which Unix didn't distinguish from any other files), and an alt-tab style switcher, and stuff.
Every new desktop that came along after Win95 copied some parts of it. On Linux, KDE, GNOME 1, Xfce. QNX's Neutrino. OS/2 4. BeOS.
And everything else died, or went away to some tiny unimportant niche. OS/2 basically died, AmigaOS died, DR GEM died, Irix died. The handful of surviving graphical Unixes had CDE, based on Motif, which was licensed from MS anyway, and Solaris adopted GNOME 2.
Only two pre-Win95 GUIs survived: NeXTstep became Mac OS X, and Acorn's RISC OS survived Acorn and was updated by other companies. Now it's FOSS.
And you know what? Those are the only 2 that had visual app switchers, and one of the people that wrote RISC OS went to work for NeXT right before NeXTstep came out and the rest of the team swear blind he took his Archimedes with him to California and NeXT nicked the idea.
Microsoft knew about NeXT -- everyone did -- and took the germ of the idea from NeXT.
If you were there, as I was, as a lot of people still in this industry that are not yet retired or dead, it's visible and obvious and clear that the Linux desktops did copy wholesale from Microsoft, specifically from Win95, and Microsoft being what it is, yes it would have patented all this, because it's highly litigious, it's got sued a lot, it often lost (e.g. against Apple, and against STAC, and against DR/Novell/Caldera).
So MS did have a case.
And lots of companies settled with MS, and those that didn't promptly redesigned their desktops and put something new out with a different design.
And they have to deny this because otherwise they would be admitting guilt.
But also, it's not directors and lawyers that design and implement GUIs, and it's not programmers that litigate against other corporations, so it's entirely possible that some of these people have no idea why management suddenly funded their project and they got to ship it.
I remain amazed this is totally forgotten. Even for the people in their mid-twenties now, this was THE news when most of those folks were probably first discovering Linux and computers.