From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 19:42:51 +0000
From: forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk
Subject: [9fans] Re: failed installation of the 3 diskette system
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 86790ab6-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025
Message-ID: <19981028194251.s06ZNkCZEZr0r11Ltpi2Upb5sxvV8T4hPGT9fRwnXB0@z>

>>I hope you have different lawyers now, these didn't have a sense
>>of humor.  ftp://ftp.bsdi.com/bsdi/info/usl

the lawyers weren't responsible for the nonsense; they got involved much
later. i'd say that both sides were on thin ice to some extent, although
i'd say that USL's was thinner than UCB's.   i suspect the problem at heart
was that USL had no idea any longer which bits were theirs,
that's to say non-trivial and derived from Unix code,
probably because they had few people on hand that knew
the code and its history.  (equally likely, the people were there
but they were not the ones that management asked!)
that was made worse when, during conversion
of some BSD code to STREAMS, someone slapped AT&T/USL
copyrights on networking code that undoubtedly was written
by UCB (and in violation of their copyright).

note that it was a lawyer (the judge) who produced
a good summary of the problem, and what seemed
to me to be a remarkably sound resolution.  i remember being
quite impressed: i kept a copy of his statement
for some years following, as a superb example of its kind.

>I still remember wondering if I could work in the computer field
>any more because I had seen UNIX source code.  That was Not Funny.

i suppose i might have wondered if i could clone Unix
legally because i had seen Unix source code, but i don't
think i'd have ruled out further work in computing,
especially if i was planning on doing original work.