[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

Theodore Ts'o tytso at mit.edu
Thu Feb 8 06:26:54 AEST 2018


On Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 02:53:10PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> Yes: AT&T's legal argument was bad. Isn't that why they lost the lawsuit?
> :-D
>

AT&T's legal argument was against BSDI and UCB.  People
misunderstanding the difference between Patent law and Trade Secret
Law into thinking that we were all contaminated and Unix was Doomed
(tm), wasn't, as far as I know, part of AT&T's lawsuit.

In the Alice/Bob/Charlie example I gave, the lawsuit was "Alice can
sue Bob for gazillions".  The assumption that Alice could then sue
Charlie who learned about the "trade secret" in a Usenix ATC paper is
a fear that others had, and wasn't part of the Alice versus Bob
lawsuit.

And *that's* why it was so important that MIT's Unix license didn't
have the trade secret clause.

						- Ted



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