"... literally bug-compatible ..."

When I used to work for the phone company.... wait, I mean Bell Labs ... I was in a department (under Rudd Canaday!) that was building an application to print phone books, so I got to learn a little about that side of the business. The Bells would deliberately put in bogus listings to see if the non-Bell phone books were stealing their data. (In the one case I was told about, they were not. The Bell company had no idea how they were getting the data.)

Marc

On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 4:28 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

On Fri, 15 Mar 2024, Douglas McIlroy wrote:

[...]

> 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.

Does anyone remember the case of the program that was literally
bug-compatible? That's mostly because the source had been pirated; the
bug was obscure enough that it was unlikely to have been reproduced
independently...

-- Dave