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From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Subject: Re: 386BSD vs BSDI
In-Reply-To: jbass@igor.tamri.com's message of Fri, 5 Mar 93 20:23:20 GMT
Message-ID: <BZS.93Mar6021509@world.std.com>
Sender: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein)
Organization: The World
References: <C3BsBv.2xHu@austin.ibm.com> <1993Mar3.214122.20180@igor.tamri.com>
<C3DE19.10z6@austin.ibm.com> <1993Mar5.202320.9758@igor.tamri.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Mar 1993 07:15:09 GMT
Lines: 44
From: jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass)
>Your claim is that anything put into a header file (and by extention you almost
>claim anything visable in the global extern list) is an interface .... but by
>who's choice? Certainly not AT&T/USL since they made no claim of public
>interfaces at V7/32V. SVR4 on the otherhand does.
Then it would seem that AT&T/USL was derelict in not challenging Posix
and their own SVID which did make those interfaces public. Not to
mention a half dozen other examples.
>My point is that this is a TOTALLY unreasonable claim requiring anyone that
>wishes to protect their software go back to the dark ages of not using
>header files and not using proceedures.
It's also unreasonable for them to claim that such publicly
distributed files constitute a trade secret. Since they don't seem to
have pursued any copyright on these at the time they were distributed
I don't see much for them to complain about.
>Certainly not EVERYTHING in all of /usr/include/* and subdirectories
>represents an interface that AT&T/USL wished published. If this were
>the way of publishing the kernel public interfaces, they certainly
>would have choosen a much different set of header files and locations.
You mean like the SVID and Bach's book?
Although I have no doubt the lawyers are pulling out all stops it's
hard to believe that AT&T/USL have gone to all this trouble just to
claim that people used their header files which they distributed a
million copies of w/o copyright, and even had entered into standards
documents some of which were in answer to charges by the US Govt of
being a single source supplier soas to invite others to implement
them, unfairly.
C'mon John, this is not even plausible on the surface. Go look into
the AFCAC suit.
--
-Barry Shein
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