From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tytso@mit.edu (Theodore Ts'o) Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2018 15:26:54 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did In-Reply-To: References: <20180206230254.GB1977@thunk.org> <20180207151347.GA29650@thunk.org> <20180207194957.GE29650@thunk.org> Message-ID: <20180207202654.GF29650@thunk.org> On Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 02:53:10PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote: > > Yes: AT&T's legal argument was bad. Isn't that why they lost the lawsuit? > :-D > AT&T's legal argument was against BSDI and UCB. People misunderstanding the difference between Patent law and Trade Secret Law into thinking that we were all contaminated and Unix was Doomed (tm), wasn't, as far as I know, part of AT&T's lawsuit. In the Alice/Bob/Charlie example I gave, the lawsuit was "Alice can sue Bob for gazillions". The assumption that Alice could then sue Charlie who learned about the "trade secret" in a Usenix ATC paper is a fear that others had, and wasn't part of the Alice versus Bob lawsuit. And *that's* why it was so important that MIT's Unix license didn't have the trade secret clause. - Ted