From: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de (Holger Veit)
Subject: Re: BSD Unix aka Freedom is a myth....
Date: 21 Jul 92 14:29:14 GMT
Distribution: comp
Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de
Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung

In <1992Jul21.112705.6276@cs.cornell.edu> murthy@cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy) writes:

>>Sender: merlin@neuro.usc.edu (merlin)
>>[Lots of stuff deleted from a press release or newspaper article?]

>>Further, AT&T's question about the time investment of BSDI in bringing out
>>their product [compared with their own cost over many years] will likely go
>>a long way toward supporting their unfair competition claim.  If it took a
>>small company like BSDI only a couple of years with a small team of people
>>to produce BSD/386 vs the multi year investment of a corporate giant - then
>>it is very possible AT&T may prevail on the unfair competition claim.

>Y'know, Doug Comer's XINU, Linus Torvalds' Linux, Tanenbaum's Minix,
>and I'm sure there are others, all stand as good arguments that the technology
>if UNIX isn't just an AT&T invention anymore - the V sytem, Mach,
>ad a zillin other ways of implementing the core of UNIX exist.

>I think that even if BSDI fails, even if 386BSD fails, and even
>if the entire Berkeley net2 distrib gets nuked,
>free unix is perhaps 2 years away - in 2 years, linux will be stable.
>In two years, the GNU Hurd will be stable.  And AT&T can 
>do almost nothing abot that, eh?

>But you're right - I'm pissed, too.  From what I heard of the history,
>BSD started with V6 unix, a developed a _whole_ _lot_
>of what currently constitutes UNIX.  To claim that AT&T did ti all is
>goinga bit far.

>--chet--

As far as I understood the above article from merlin, AT&T not only claims
that BSDI has used the trademark "UNIX", but more important, that they had
taken code from a 'something system' named net-2 from some university, which
(in AT&T's opinion) might have been rewritten to contain no line that grep 
would match with the original sources, but covers at least the "idea" 
behind UNIX. If I understand this correctly, and AT&T will win, then any 
NIXe or XINe above could be sued. I can imagine an interpretation of what is 
the "idea of UNIX," it might be a lot of things, including
  file system (inodes, hierarchical tree, naming conventions)
  process management (e.g. init, fork, setuid!)
  device driver management (terminal disciplines)
  the set of system and user calls (remember the GETCHAR macro)
  pipelining concept of the shells (in general: user interfacing) 
Any of the derived versions (or reverse engineered or developed from scratch)
has at least one aspect of UNIX. Even if the programmers haven't even seen
one byte of AT&T source, there are things that will likely be done the same
or a similar way, provided the data structures remain "compatible". You may
#include <stdio.h> in your programs and give your source away, but don't 
dare *) to take a part of /usr/include and put it into your distribution to
set up a base of compatible definitions....:-(

*) if grep -i AT&T /usr/include/* returns output

Hopefully this will never come true.

Holger

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