*BSD News Article 10753


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From: cflatter@nrao.edu (Chris Flatters)
Subject: Re: George William Herbert's Challenge - Part
Message-ID: <1993Feb3.212408.2942@zia.aoc.nrao.edu>
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Organization: NRAO
References: <1993Feb3.175211.13214@igor.tamri.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 21:24:08 GMT
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There are several problems with John Bass' arguments.

1) John contends that "methodology and algorithms, including the sequence of
   processes adopted by the programmer" are protected.  In support of this he
   cites the discussion of copyright from Numerical Recipes (Press at al.,
   1986).  Press et al (or their lawyers) specifically and unambiguously
   exclude these from protection:

	"Copyright does not protect ideas, but only the expression of those ideas
	 in a particular form. In the case of a computer program, the ideas
	 consist of the program's methodology and algorithm, including the
	 sequence of processes adopted by the programmer.  The expression of these
	 ideas is the program source code and its derived object code."
					(Numerical Recipes, 1st edn, p xiii)

   This clearly contradicts John's argument.

2) The publicly known parts of the USL suite may cover assertions that range
   from USL believing NET2 contains code that is a trivial modification
   (eg. renaming of variables or resizing of arrays) to USL believing that
   they have copyright protection for the general organization of the UNIX
   source code.  USL don't want to make their exact claims known (for whatever
   reason) and we are unlikely to find out what the scope of the claims
   are until they have their day in court.  So far there is no reason to
   believe that anyone has accused UCB or BSDI of anything as broad as John
   asserts.

3) John confuses the Jolitz' 386BSD with BSDI's BSD/386.  These are seperate
   developments.  So far (unless I missed something in the trade rags) the
   USL lawsuit has not been broadened to include 386BSD.  This together with
   the timing of the lawsuit and the allusions to conspiracy suggests that
   it is BSDI's intent to commercialize BSD that has provoked USL's actions
   (I believe that several members of CSRG have interests in BSDI and I
   know that Bill Jolitz parted ways with CSRG since he believed that the
   decontaminated BSD source code should be freely distributable).

	Chris Flatters
	cflatter@nrao.edu