*BSD News Article 2480


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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!mcsun!Germany.EU.net!unido!adagio!grog
From: grog@adagio.UUCP (Greg Lehey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: AT&T sues BSDI
Message-ID: <1833@adagio.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jul 92 11:51:07 GMT
References: <1821@adagio.UUCP> <14ojorINNlm5@disaster.Germany.EU.net> <1992Jul24.171828.11246@Warren.MENTORG.COM>
Organization: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
Lines: 31

In article <1992Jul24.171828.11246@Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes:
>[ I can't resist one more post ]
>
>In <14ojorINNlm5@disaster.Germany.EU.net> bs@Germany.EU.net (Bernard Steiner) writes:
>
>>Does that mean that anyone having seen a Ford and then goes off designing
>>hir own car will be sued by Ford for the reason of having been exposed
>>to Ford cars ?
>
>There is a difference between reading the source, and using the
>program.
>
>HAS ANYONE COMPARED THE CODE THEMSELVES?  Could someone with a source
>license FTP the damn NET2 release, pass them through "indent" and then
>compare them?

Well, considering some aspects of the suit, I hope that nobody who has
seen AT&T code will admit to the fact on the net, but I can state that
somebody close to me has compared some selected BSDI and SVR4 sources
and has found very little similarity. Where there was similarity, the
AT&T sources also contained copyright notices from the Regents of the
University of California. The dissimilarity goes to the point that the
parameters to certain key functions are different in number, type and
meaning. With the exception of AT&T borrowing from UCB, they would
appear to be different implementations of an operating system of the
kind defined by POSIX.
-- 
Greg Lehey                       | Tel: +49-6637-1488              
LEMIS                            | Fax: +49-6637-1489
Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
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