From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2017 17:28:08 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] System Economics In-Reply-To: <201703161933.v2GJXAdo144602@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> References: <201703161933.v2GJXAdo144602@tahoe.cs.Dartmouth.EDU> Message-ID: 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.