----- Original Message -----

From:

"Cory Smelosky" <b4@gewt.net>

To:

Cc:

"TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>

Sent:

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:32:41 -0800

Subject:

Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?


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.
>
> Steve
>
>

Coherent?