[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[Clem Cole via TUHS]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 12:21 PM Rich Salz via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> More fun Trade Secret stories. I think around the time that Usenix was
> funding UUNet, Rick Adams asked an ATT lawyer what would happen if someone
> uploaded all the Unix source to Usenet from a payphone. "He gulped" and
> admitted the trade secret protection would be gone.  Perhaps Clem was in
> the room where that conversation happened.
>
Nope.

But the difference is that CMU's lawyers made any student who had AT&T code
sign an NDA  (even for the OS course).   They wanted to ensure we
understand the source code we were using for the class had a copyright and
that we would not share that >>source<< with anyone.  But when we signed
that document, the CMU lawyers stated explicitly to us (and also supposedly
had reminded AT&T's lawyers) that under PA law, there were two items:

   1. anything we >>learned<< was ours to keep, and
   2. the AT&T license could not restrict someone from working at Place X
   because once they saw Place Y's IP.

I believe California has the same law. I do know that in Massachusetts,
from being personally involved when Tom Teixeria and I left Masscomp for
Stellar, Masscomp could not stop us (which, at the time, Gus Klein, who had
recently been named President of Masscomp, tried to sue. These two points
held firm — Gus eventually backed off).

BTW: I also know that the trade secret was the crux of the  AT&T vs
BSDi/UCB [not copyright infringement, like many of us thought initially].
 In the end, the court was explicit: Yes, AT&T owned the IP (i.e., methods
and ideas from UNIX were AT&T's IP).  However, once AT&T allowed someone to
see the IP (much less publish papers and books about said IP in the open), the
IP could not be called a trade secret (I still have my "mentally
contaminated" button that a number of us at UCB had made.  And as we know,
BSDi/UCB prevailed.   FWIW: if AT&T had one, then all of the rewrites of
UNIX's IP [starting with Idris to the then burgeoning Linux] would have
fallen up that rule).

So, it sounds like MIT had the sentence struck, while the lawyers at CMU
and UCB took a similar stance that you cannot create a "mind eraser" and
you cannot keep someone from working, just because they worked for you.