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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!cs.utexas.edu!hellgate.utah.edu!fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry 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/* THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T */ 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. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I have an 8 user poetic license" - me Get the 386bsd FAQ from agate.berkeley.edu:/pub/386BSD/386bsd-0.1/unofficial -------------------------------------------------------------------------------