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From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: 386BSD vs BSDI
Message-ID: <1993Mar10.202237.925@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: news@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <1993Mar3.120727.11788@igor.tamri.com> <C3BsBv.2xHu@austin.ibm.com> <1993Mar3.214122.20180@igor.tamri.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Mar 93 20:22:37 GMT
Lines: 41
In article <1993Mar3.214122.20180@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:
>In article <C3BsBv.2xHu@austin.ibm.com> guyd@austin.ibm.com (Guy Dawson) writes:
>[ list deleted ]
>>
>>If they are defined that I would argue that they are published since
>>the purpose of the header files in /usr/include and /usr/include/sys etc
>>is to publish APIs etc.
>
>... some people would like to think so, but I disagree ... many vendors
>ended up with the following text in their header files (from SGI):
>
>/* Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T */
>/* All Rights Reserved */
>
>/* THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T */
>/* The copyright notice above does not evidence any */
>/* actual or intended publication of such source code. */
>
>in addition many of the fields and defines in the header files are
>strictly FYI since C lacks better data hiding abilities .... their
>mere existance in a header file does not include them in the API.
If it's in a publicly accessable header file which does not require a
license agreement to see (users of a system != purchasers of the system),
it's published.
One might go so far as to argue data retrievable by "nm" is published; if
so, it's also arguable that function call order and arguments shown by
"trace" (or "truss" for SVR4) is also published.
Terry Lambert
terry@icarus.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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