Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2002 21:28:13 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org>, "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com>, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Real UNIX history (was: Congrats to Brett Glass for new BSD history article) Message-ID: <3DA3B05D.6DCAD9E8@mindspring.com> References: <20021008145226.K30424-100000@pogo.caustic.org> <3DA36DF9.CD52524F@mindspring.com> <20021009013329.GB1415@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > On Tuesday, 8 October 2002 at 16:44:57 -0700, Terry Lambert wrote: > > "f.johan.beisser" wrote: > >> BSD was always free. the AT&T code for UNIX was not. > > > > UNIX was free, too. The consent decree from the Greene decision > > on the AT&T antitrust case forbit AT&T from making money from > > selling software. > > That didn't make it free. No, you;re right. It was the "them not charging for it" that made it free. 8-). > > This was the original "Western Electric" license that UCB got the > > UNIX sources under. This is the same license that permitted the > > University of Queensland commented source code book to be > > distributed. > > UQ? That was UNSW. > http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/foldoc/15/67.htm. You'll note that > John got hell for it, though UNIX was still not available > commercially. I always get the two confused; sorry. John got hell for it because they wanted to post-facto enforce rights that they didn't reserve at the time that they made the distribution to John, UCB, etc., because they were legally prohibited from claiming those rights, under the consent decreee, because of AT&T's previous violations of the Sherman anti-trust acts. Part of the Bell breakup was intentional on the part of AT&T to get out from under these judgements. You'll notice that the phone company has reassembled itself, very much like the Terminator II reassembled itself from its pieces. SBC owns the majority of the local telephone network, due to mergers between the RBOC's (Regional Bell Operating Companies/"Baby Bells"). AT&T is back to offering intrastate long distance, as well, something which it had been prohibited from doing, when the name was divested into a long distance carrier. The really amusing part is that a number of these mergers have been paid for using the balance on long term debt instruments that were created as part of the divestiture. > >> yes, there were portions of AT&T code, once those were purged, the > >> BSD code no longer fell under the AT&T license, and could be > >> distributed freely again. in the meanwhile, the plucky Linux kernel > >> jumped out of the woodwork. > > > > Nice rewrite on history, there... 8-). > > I think you do better. What part of the statement above do you > disagree with? That the AT&T license meant anything to UCB, which, at the time, did not have an AT&T license; the UCB code was derived from code under the Western Electric license. UCB settled, even when MIT had publically stated a willingness to back the UCB position with their patent portfolio (try to do any work in CS without infringing an MIT patent), and Dennis Ritchie offered (again publically) to testify that there were no USL trade secrets embodied in the UCB code. Strip the VAX code, and the only issue was whether or not the code was disclosing a trade secret. Trade secret law is very clear that one can only recover damages from a discloser who is a member of a select group, and is also contractually bound to non-disclosure. There were no non-disclosure terms in the original Western Electric license (this is a matter of public record). Collection of the damages is an acknowledgement of disclosure, and once disclosed, a trade secret is no longer a trade secret, and therefore republication of the information is not illegal. In fact, Digital Equipment Corporation never took the Net/2 source code down from the gatekeeper.dec.com archive, on the basis of this legal principle, even though they were served with papers: disclosure meant no trade secrets existed. The whole case was, in fact, about supressing a bootable UCB derived code base which did not pay unit royalties to USL, for fear that it would take market share away from the USL UNIX. It is no mistake that the files "identified as containing USL intellectual property" in the USL/UCB settlement were six files that removed major components from 5 major subsystems, on the theory that a bootable BSD would take significantly longer to be recreated than it was -- if it was ever recreated. Linux was left alone because it was (1) international, and therefore difficult to enforce against, and (2) not perceived as a credible threat to the commercial UNIX market. Luckily they very much underestimated the ability of the community to replace the code in the files they targetted as part of the settlement. Personally, given the MIT backing, and the backing from the engieers at USL and Bell Labs of the time, I've never understood why UCB "bent over" for USL, unless they were getting something out of it; of course, the terms of the settlement are undisclosed. Perhaps we can petition for them under the FOIA, given that UCB is a federally funded institution... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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