No subject

[Scott Schwartz schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu]

I retrieved Dennis' first message from the recycling bin.
In the interest of completeness, here it is.

-- Scott


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Date:    Thu, 21 Sep 1995 17:37:07 -0400
From:    dmr@plan9.att.com
To:      owner-9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: re: breakup

A partial answer to "how will this affect AT&T Bell Labs?"
is as follows--the new, still unnamed technology company
will get the bulk of core Bell Labs, which includes research,
as well as the Bell Labs name.  The exact fraction is
not decided yet but numbers in the range 60-80% have
been mentioned.  The remainder will stay with AT&T
in a new AT&T Laboratories.  In thinking about these
figures, keep in mind that about half of research is
in the physical science area and it is assumed that
essentially all of this will be in Bell Labs; that
biases the division of the rest.

In general the division will be along obvious lines of work--
people involved with services to AT&T, with products to
Bell Labs.  In some cases, including most of our own
group, it is not an obvious call, and we don't know
which it will be.  Arno Penzias did remark today that the
split will not be like the one at divestiture,
in which one or two people from each group were selected
to go to Bellcore to yield similar populations; here it will
be more in groups as a whole. (But Arno is about to
leave his position as VP of research, so this is only
his opinion.)

Incidentally the intended time scale has the
new internal organizations being planned during the
fall and in place in the spring.  The formal
split is supposed to be accomplished at the beginning
of 1997.

I don't know what will happen with Plan 9 licensing.
During the official briefing it was mentioned that
division of IP was one of the thorniest of all the
issues, but this has to do especially with patent
licencing (if AT&T has an agreement with someone now,
who inherits it?)  Given that Plan 9 is hardly of
strategic interest to either company, I would trust
that we could argue that the outside licensing should
go where we go, and I wouldn't be surprised if
the other company kept rights to use.

There's no reason at this point to expect the split
to change the nature of our work.  But a lot is going
to happen in the next year.

		Dennis

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