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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!sdd.hp.com!mips!darwin.sura.net!europa.asd.contel.com!uunet!mcsun!uknet!icdoc!dds From: dds@doc.ic.ac.uk (Diomidis D Spinellis) Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: UNIGRAM's article on the USL-BSDI suit Message-ID: <1992Aug3.161015.7120@doc.ic.ac.uk> Date: 3 Aug 92 16:10:15 GMT References: <45961@shamash.cdc.com> <25138@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <1992Aug3.143259.23897@crd.ge.com> Sender: usenet@doc.ic.ac.uk Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK. Lines: 29 Nntp-Posting-Host: swan.doc.ic.ac.uk In article <1992Aug3.143259.23897@crd.ge.com> davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes: > 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. Trying to play the devil's advocate, I can see why BSDI could be afraid of such a comparison. A third party examining the whole body of the source code, would definitely find many similarities between the BSDI and the AT&T version. I think that the directory structure, the split into modules, and the filenames would be similar between the two systems. The third party could argue, that that top level hierarchical organisation was based on the AT&T code. It could furthermore argue, that the top level organisation was a major and significant part of the propriety system. > 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 doubt it: since the BSDI source code is part of their distribution it would be very unwise to include AT&T code in it. Either some code was left there by mistake, or AT&T will claim that they copied something more general, like the system structure (see above). Diomidis -- Diomidis Spinellis Internet: <dds@doc.ic.ac.uk> UUCP: ...!ukc!icdoc!dds Department of Computing, Imperial College, London SW7 #include "/dev/tty"