*BSD News Article 10728


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From: sef@Kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan)
Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: George William Herbert's Challenge - Part 2 (opening arguments)
Date: 3 Feb 1993 11:25:45 -0800
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References: <106742@netnews.upenn.edu> <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu> <1993Feb3.002534.5637@igor.tamri.com>

In article <1993Feb3.002534.5637@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:
>I will later show that Net-2 and 386BSD release by UCB violates the
>AT&T ownership by maintaining the same "methodology, algorithms and
>sequence of processes" in nearly all of the code cloned from both
>UNIX source and Bach puedocode.

First of all, 386BSD was not released by UCB.  It was released by William
and Lynne Jolitz, and is based largely upon the Net/2 tape, just as
BSD/386, from BSDi, is.

>*** In the mean time, I urge readers to review the above, find your own
>copy of Bach and examine the clock, tty and bio code in 386BSD. ****

So you adamit that Bach is enough to implement the code you claim was
stolen?

There is *no* kernel code in Bach.  There is, however, a discussion of
algorithms, and pseudocode.  Having implemented a version of execve() from
the pseudocode in Bach, I can say right now:  that pseudocode is *not*
the end-all.  Moreover, since Bach was pretty clearly intended as a
textbook in classes, which could be expected to implement the things
discussed in the book, trying to claim that it is not intended to be
used is pretty stupid.

And lastly, if the pseudocode in Bach is everything necessary to implement
UNIX, then USL has already lost their trade secret status, and the copyrights
of certain distributions of UNIX will almost certainly be challenged during
the lawsuit.

You have yet to demonstrate any copyright violation.  I have seen and
worked with USL source code (SysVr2 through SysVr4), BSD source code
(from 4.1BSD), 386BSD source code, and BSD/386 source code, and any
similarity to the USL source code I maintain is due either to the publication
of the algorithm in Bach, a thorough knowledge of the original code and a
desire or need to make it compatible, or the fact that USL took the
code from Berkeley to begin with.

You can't copyright ideas, or algorithms.  (Although you can patent them.)