[TUHS] System Economics

[Wesley Parish]

In relation to which, a google search on "site:groklaw.net unix methods" yields some interesting 
observations on this very topic of "trade secrets" wrt Unix.

Wesley Parish

Quoting Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com>:

> On 3/16/17, Doug McIlroy <doug at cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > "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.
> 
> 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.
>  



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