*BSD News Article 2481


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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: Is AT&T listening?...
Message-ID: <1834@adagio.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jul 92 12:01:28 GMT
References: <1992Jul23.200547.22246@cs.rose-hulman.edu> <97@ampr.ab.ca>
Organization: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
Lines: 51

In article <97@ampr.ab.ca> lyndon@ampr.ab.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
>Yes, they're listening. cjc@ulysses.att.com was kind enough to point
>out that one of my previous postings about the copying of /bin/true
>source code was incorrect. It is in fact, as he stated in e-mail, the
>BSD version of /bin/true that contains 'echo 0'. The System V version
>of /bin/true instead contains five lines of copyright notice, one line
>of version control information, and a colon. 

The number of lines of code is irrelevant; what's important is the
copyright notice. Look, for example, at an AT&T version of /etc/fstab.
Do you have something like:

#	Copyright (c) 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988 AT&T
#	  All Rights Reserved

#	THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
#	No, come to think of it, this is utter bullshit. Apart
#	from this copyright notice, everything in this file has
#	been created by the local sysop. It contains no source
#	code whatsoever.
#	The copyright notice above does not evidence any
#	actual or intended publication of such source code.

#ident	"@(#)fstab.sh	2.3 - 88/05/26"

# format: mountdev fs [-[rd]] [fstype]
# This file is used by /etc/mount, /etc/mountall, and /etc/rmountall


/dev/dsk/0s3	/usr
/dev/dsk/1s4	/src
allegro:/usr	/allegro/usr	NFS,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft
allegro:/	/allegro/root	NFS,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft
allegro:/bsdi	/bsdi		NFS,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft
allegro:/var	/var		NFS,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft
allegro:/pub	/pub		NFS,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft
# grave:/		/grave  NFS,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft
# /dev/dsk/0p1 	/c	DOS	

Presumably I would not be able to give a copy of this file to a
customer without an AT&T license, since it contains an AT&T copyright
statement. I am not even allowed to remove it. It's not clear what
would happen if I were to remove the file and start again from
scratch, and what the difference would be between that line of action
and just removing the copyright notice.

-- 
Greg Lehey                       | Tel: +49-6637-1488              
LEMIS                            | Fax: +49-6637-1489
Schellnhausen 2, W-6324 Feldatal, Germany
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