On 3/16/17, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote: That matches my recollection: AT&T treated the UNIX sources as a trade secret. When I worked on DEC's port of the VAX/VMS linker to Ultrix, our team was very careful to work from the a.out specification only, and to avoid any contact with the sources to ld. We wanted to avoid any chance of AT&T claiming that our VMS linker port in any way used their proprietary technology. AT&T made the sources available pretty widely in academia, for use as a teaching tool, and some of the universities involved seemed to play pretty fast and loose with the NDA. A lot of CS students I talked to were under the impression that the UNIX sources were freely open and hackable at their college. Because of this I always wondered whether, if push came to shove, AT&T would be able to legally enforce its trade secret claims. I don't think the issue was ever actually litigated. -Paul W.

Yes, Doug is spot on.  Being told by the govt. that we had to patent everything we could and license it fairly got rather strange when software was involved -- there was a lot of question whether software could be patented at all, and the Labs had to patent software if it could be patented (e.g., the setuid bit). The biggest issue, which still hasn't gone away, is that software moves so much faster than the law.  The lawyers seemed to take the standpoint that if something was questionable, just wait for five years until there are better legal precedents. At one point I made a major push to get the PCC grammar for C released in the public domain.  I still think this would have brought standardization about much sooner, and my managers were in favor of it.  But the lawyers delayed and delayed.  The next thing you know, we had "far pointers" and all sorts of other gook in the language that took the standards committee additional years to wring out.  Sigh... Steve ----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug McIlroy" &lt;doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu&gt; To:<tuhs@tuhs.org> Cc: Sent:Thu, 16 Mar 2017 15:33:10 -0400 Subject:Re: [TUHS] System Economics "Open" was certainly not a work heard in the Unix lab, where our lawyers made sure we knew it was a "trade secret". John Lions was brought into the lab both because we admired his work and because the lawyers wanted to reel that work back in-house. Out in the field, the trade secret was treated in many different ways. Perhaps the most extreme was MIT, whose lawyers believed it could not be adequately protected in academia and forbade its use there. I don't know what eventually broke the logjam. Doug