From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: wes.parish@paradise.net.nz (Wesley Parish) Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2017 12:46:49 +1300 (NZDT) Subject: [TUHS] System Economics In-Reply-To: References: <201703161933.v2GJXAdo144602@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: <1489708009.58cb23e901ea8@www.paradise.net.nz> 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 : > On 3/16/17, Doug McIlroy 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