[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[Theodore Ts'o via TUHS]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 12:53:21PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> 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).

I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect IP law wasn't as settled back then.
Remember, this was before courts ruled that Lotus couldn't copyright
their user interface.  And even if the law was "clear", the way the US
court system works is that the party with the larger legal budget can
often intimidate people who might not be able to afford the best
justice money can buy.

This is what I've learned by hanging around lawyers who disagreed
about whether it was "safe" to ship CDDL-licened ZFS code ported to
GPL-licensed Linux kernel.  It's not just about law, but how litigious
the copyright owner might be, and if the defendant is a small company,
such a lawsuit might be seen as "punching down", but if the defendant
was a large company, it might have very different PR angle, and PR is
often at least as important whether the company prevails in a court of
law (if defendant doesn't go out of business first).

Even if you will eventually win, there's a reason why many people will
settle patent lawsuits because even if you are sure that you are in
the right, it might be cheaper to pay the Danegeld than to eventually
prevail after multiple years of litigation.

So I wouldn't be surprised that different legal teams coming from
different universities might have come out in different places
(especially if they thought they could use their Alumni mafia back
channel to eventually side step the whole issue.  :-)

	    	    	      	  	- Ted