[TUHS] Source code abundance?
Random832
random832 at fastmail.com
Tue Mar 7 10:33:27 AEST 2017
On Mon, Mar 6, 2017, at 18:31, Steve Johnson wrote:
> I can attest to at least one case where AT&T attempted to see whether
> its Unix code had been stolen. A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
> attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had been
> copied before bringing out the big legal guns. I was one of
> several people asked to log into the system and see what I could
> figure out. They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc,
> because they assumed that would be hard to duplicate.
>
> So I spent an interesting hour checking it out. The first thing I
> did was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised
> features were in the program, and they weren't. Then I threw a
> couple of difficult cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their
> code. And besides, it was VERY slow. So I concluded it was a
> reimplementation. I gather that was the consensus of others as
> well, and AT&T backed off.
Sounds a lot like Dennis Ritchie's Coherent story:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4
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