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From: davidsen@ariel.crd.GE.COM (william E Davidsen)
Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: UNIGRAM's article on the USL-BSDI suit
Message-ID: <1992Aug3.143259.23897@crd.ge.com>
Date: 3 Aug 92 14:32:59 GMT
References: <1992Aug1.020513.14170@plts.uucp> <1992Aug1.042344.23428@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <leb.712651912@Hypatia> <3YWHI6A@taronga.com> <45961@shamash.cdc.com> <25138@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
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Reply-To: davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corporate R&D Center, Schenectady NY
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In article <25138@dog.ee.lbl.gov>, torek@horse.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:
| >BSDI, meanwhile, is attempting to try the case in the court of public
| >opinion. The week before last it put the full text of the initial
| >complaint (but not the expanded suit) on UUNet ostensibly because
| >so many were asking to see the exact wording.
|
| I have repeated this here (in its original placement) because I believe
| this placement is contrived to obscure the fact that the expanded suit
| was not available, and thus could not possibly have been put on UUNET,
| at that time. UNIGRAM is attempting to imply that BSDI is somehow
| being underhanded in disclosing the text of the initial complaint.
What they imply in in the mind of the reader, but what they say sounds
true to me. They appear to be trying to swing public opinion against
USL, to bring pressure and cause damages (as in people buying osf1 or
BSD/386 on moral rather than technical grounds). I don't normally expect
this behavior of someone who expects to be upheld in court.
It seems to me that the university was not really trying to solve the
issue when they refused to let a mutually agreed third party examing the
whole body of code. By insisting on snapshots they give the appearance
of trying to hide something, even if they're not.
It seems to me that a lot of people want something for nothing, and
dislike AT&T/USL for trying to profit from their UNIX software. Some do
this by creating a bound spinoff like osf/1, while other try to do this
by writing a whole new o/s. like linux. Unfortunately there is a third
class of person who trys to steal the UNIX code, either byte for byte or
by rewiting the individual routines, and that's what the case is all
about.
When this started I thought the major legitimate complaint was that
BSDI was using the word UNIX pretty freely in its literature. Now that
so much effort is going into avoiding a fair evaluation of the entire
body of the code, I am willing to accept the possibility the BSDI has
used some UNIX code in their implementation.
I still have an open mind on this, but that's a long way from my
original assumption. Based on the old "if it walks like a duck..."
addage, if a party behaves as if they have something to hide it
certainly doesn't help me believe they don't.
--
bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; Box 8; Schenectady NY 12345
I admit that when I was in school I wrote COCOL. But I didn't compile.