[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[Theodore Ts'o via TUHS]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 11:41:05PM -0400, Douglas McIlroy via TUHS wrote:
> Early adoption was precluded by the MIT legal department's opinion
> that AT&T's trade-secret assertion was too onerous. As I understand
> it, the main sticking point was that one was not supposed to use
> anything one learned from Unix code in any other context. I don't how
> other universities' legal departments regarded the trade
> secret--perhaps that the cat was so far out of the bag that strict
> enforcement was impossible.
> 
> I'd love to hear how MIT's Unix ban was broken, and how long it took
> for that to happen.

The way that I heard the story was that MIT lawyers interpreted the
trade-secret assertion that since it included the magic term "methods
and concepts", if any MIT student was exposed to Unix's "methods and
concepts", they would be subject to the trade secret restrictions.
This was interpreted as "MIT students would be contiminated and might
not be able to be able to work for other employers or do various work
in the future, and We Won't Stand For It."

The way it was broken was that someone managed to get an MIT Alum
working at AT&T as some high-ranking muckety-muck to give MIT a
license where the contract did *not* have the Methods and Concepts
clause.  The problem with that was that AT&T legal *hated* the fact
that MIT had a license without the Methods and Concepts clause, and so
they refused to acknolwedge to other companies (say, such as Digital),
that MIT had a valid Unix source license, and so this prevented MIT
Project Athena from getting an official Ultrix source license.

But thanks to some other MIT alum, MIT Project Athena mysteriously got
an Ultrix sourc tree that had core dumps in it, that was apparently an
taken from some engineering machine, as opposed to an official Digital
source release.

Now, I wasn't there so this is a second or third-hand story; nor have
I seen the purpoted license w/o the Methods and Concepts clause.  But
I have seen the unofficial Ultrix source tree in an MIT AFS volume.

Based on this story, if it is true, even though I have been exposed to
Unix source code from before the BSD distribution on the 'Net, as far
as I know, I was never subject to the Methods and Concepts clause,
because MIT has a Unix license without that clause.

In any case, given that I never signed any NDA when I Started working
as a student systems programmer, the way Trade Secret law works, I
would never have been liability; the legal risk would have been solely
bourne by MIT.  And apparently, MIT at one point wasn't willing to
take that legal risk, or require students to sign NDA's.  I'm guessing
UCB's lawyers had a different understanding of the Methods and
Concepts clause, or perhaps didn't take it seriously?  As far as I
know no staff or students at UCB signed contracts binding them to
adhere to keeping AT&T's trade secrets, right?  If that's true, the
trade secret would have been doomed anyway.

Cheers,

						- Ted