[TUHS] Source code abundance?

Cory Smelosky b4 at gewt.net
Tue Mar 7 09:32:41 AEST 2017


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?



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