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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!cs.utexas.edu!qt.cs.utexas.edu!yale.edu!think.com!paperboy.osf.org!meissner From: meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) Subject: Re: AT&T sues BSDI In-Reply-To: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu's message of 25 Jul 92 10:14:13 GMT Message-ID: <MEISSNER.92Jul28141402@tiktok.osf.org> Sender: news@osf.org (USENET News System) Organization: Open Software Foundation References: <1992Jul22.221515.23550@tfs.com> <QUANSTRO.92Jul24122923@lars.StOlaf.edu> <1992Jul25.061414.3401@spcvxb.spc.edu> Date: 28 Jul 92 14:14:02 Lines: 19 In article <1992Jul25.061414.3401@spcvxb.spc.edu> terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) writes: | If AT&T/USL wins this case, this means that any vendor can claim that they | have rights of "intellectual ancestry" or some such balderdash over any pack- | age found on the net. What would you think if they claimed that AT&T/USL had | "rights" to GCC because the specification of C was originally developed by | them? In this specific case, AT&T cannot do this, because they specifically gave up any rights to the "C" language as part of the ANSI (and now ISO) standardization. ANSI would not have allowed a standard controlled in this fashion. I believe that AT&T did do the same thing for the interfaces that have become POSIX interfaces. -- Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861 Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142 You are in a twisty little passage of standards, all conflicting.