From: wes.parish@paradise.net.nz (Wesley Parish)
Subject: [TUHS] System Economics
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2017 12:46:49 +1300 (NZDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <1489708009.58cb23e901ea8@www.paradise.net.nz> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABH=_VTE0+Sc-_ez=iho6jBOW8Jhfot6xMkt2LLTNqyC9R2aKA@mail.gmail.com>
In relation to which, a google search on "site:groklaw.net unix methods" yields some interesting
observations on this very topic of "trade secrets" wrt Unix.
Wesley Parish
Quoting Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>:
> On 3/16/17, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > "Open" was certainly not a work heard in the Unix lab,
> > where our lawyers made sure we knew it was a "trade secret".
> > John Lions was brought into the lab both because we admired
> > his work and because the lawyers wanted to reel that work
> > back in-house.
>
> That matches my recollection: AT&T treated the UNIX sources as a
> trade secret. When I worked on DEC's port of the VAX/VMS linker to
> Ultrix, our team was very careful to work from the a.out specification
> only, and to avoid any contact with the sources to ld. We wanted to
> avoid any chance of AT&T claiming that our VMS linker port in any way
> used their proprietary technology.
>
> AT&T made the sources available pretty widely in academia, for use as
> a teaching tool, and some of the universities involved seemed to play
> pretty fast and loose with the NDA. A lot of CS students I talked to
> were under the impression that the UNIX sources were freely open and
> hackable at their college. Because of this I always wondered whether,
> if push came to shove, AT&T would be able to legally enforce its trade
> secret claims. I don't think the issue was ever actually litigated.
>
> -Paul W.
>
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-03-16 23:46 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-03-16 19:33 Doug McIlroy
2017-03-16 20:05 ` Clem Cole
2017-03-16 21:28 ` Paul Winalski
2017-03-16 23:46 ` Wesley Parish [this message]
2017-03-17 1:04 ` Steve Johnson
2017-03-16 20:21 Noel Chiappa
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