[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[Warner Losh via TUHS]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 12:21 PM Theodore Ts'o via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org>
wrote:

> 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.
>

It's worse than that. The US joined the Berne Convention in 1980, which
threw a lot of monkey wrenches into things. The 1980 Copyright act changed
a lot of things. Prior to that, you could not copyright software *AT*ALL*.
This is why Unix was done via Trade Secret: they couldn't copyright the
software.


> 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).
>

This is true... It's all about risk. How much risk are you willing to take
with an action? There's never 0 risk. And the answer often depends on the
specifics.


> 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.  :-)
>

Yea. It's all about risk. How much risk is there? Do we care? How do we
mitigate it? There's times you "play nice" even if you think the other side
has no case because long-game strategies (like the Alumni mafia) are easier
to get things resolved than an instant head-on collision.

Warner