15 Mar
2024
15 Mar
'24
11:27 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 05:23:44PM -0400, Douglas McIlroy wrote:
Oh come on, you can leave that juicy story there. What happened next?
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Larry McVoy Retired to fishing http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat
There was
lawyerly concern about the code being stolen.
Not always misplaced. There was a guy in Boston who sold Unix look-alike
programs. A quick look at the binary revealed perfect correlation with our
C source. Coincidentally, DEC had hired this person as a consultant in
connection with cross-licensing negotiations with AT&T. Socializing at
the end of a day's negotiations, our lawyer somehow managed to turn the
conversation to software piracy. He discussed a case he was working on,
and happened to have some documents about it in his briefcase. He pulled
out a page disassembled binary and a page of source code and showed them to
the consultant.
After a little study, the consultant confidently opined that the binary was
obviously compiled from that source. "Would it surprise you," the lawyer
asked, "if I told you that this is yours and that is ours?" The consultant
did not attend the following day's meeting.