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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!mips!mips!darwin.sura.net!europa.asd.contel.com!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: UNIGRAM's article on the USL-BSDI suit Message-ID: <7123@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 10 Aug 92 12:16:16 GMT References: <1992Aug6.135607.5620@crd.ge.com> <1992Aug6.163425.3373@ornl.gov> <1992Aug7.200342.13878@Warren.MENTORG.COM> Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 35 In article <1992Aug7.200342.13878@Warren.MENTORG.COM> tal@Warren.MENTORG.COM (Tom Limoncelli) writes: >I think Bill Davidsen's analogy is the best so far, at least >it agrees the best with how I interpret all the documents >published so far. > >In <1992Aug6.163425.3373@ornl.gov> de5@ORNL.GOV (Dave Sill) writes: > >>In article <1992Aug6.135607.5620@crd.ge.com>, davidsen@ariel.crd.GE.COM (william E Davidsen) writes: > >>>And the original foundation was replaced, beam by beam, block by block, >>>nail by nail, until nothing was left but Tony's materials, pretty much in >>>the shape of the original foundation. Then Tony said "I'm quitting >>>building, but I'm going to give away the whole house, because it's all >>>mine now." > >>This is the crux of the matter, I think: Was it a block-by-block >>replacement, was it a new design meeting the same specs, or a hybrid? We already know that many things in BSD couldn't be block-by-block replacements, because those features of the OS weren't in the code Berkeley got from AT&T in any form. We also know that there can be, at most, only a very small part of the OS that was a beam-by-beamm, block-by-block, nail-by-nail replacement, because the people at berkeley made improvements everywhere, drawing on a wide range of sources. We also know that many, many things about AT&T Unix have been published in books ands papers and hence cannot count as secrets of any sort, much less as trade secrets. All of this is ignored in the analogy quoted above. That is why it is not a good analogy. -- jd