From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: pnr@planet.nl (Paul Ruizendaal) Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:51:11 +0100 Subject: [TUHS] Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...] In-Reply-To: <20170222182440.GE9439@mcvoy.com> References: <20170222161114.GT9439@mcvoy.com> <20170222182440.GE9439@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: <0793B069-8A80-450E-9E49-68C19448C2E9@planet.nl> On 22 Feb 2017, at 19:24 , Larry McVoy wrote: > So what is written there was not how I felt at all. I personally felt > like AT&T had a case, I thought it was copyright not trade secret. I'm not a lawyer, but wasn't part of the background that prior to 1988 in US law one could not claim both copyright and trade secret protection, and that for something to be copyrighted it had to expressly claim to be copyrighted material, and be registered as such? I have a vague recollection that the AT&T legal department instructed the Unix team to remove copyright notices from the Unix source (and this seems supported by code, see for instance: http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/sys/ken/sys1.c and http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/ken/sys1.c) because the legal folks thought that trade secret was a stronger protection for software? I also seem to recall that the AT&T code base included original material from CSRG where the copyright notice had been removed by USL. All in all, the USL lawyers probably felt that they would lose the case if fought on the grounds of copyright violations alone. I wish something like Groklaw had existed during the USL-UCB case: the legal twists and turns would have been documented a lot better. There is some material though, see: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=legal-docs#bsdi The amicus brief by the Regents, and the settlement make for interesting reading. If the position taken by the Regents is correct, all of Unix up to and including 32V is in the public domain now. Warren: the links from Groklaw to TUHS are broken, perhaps because of the recent reorganization of the archive.