[TUHS] History of cal(1)?

[Theodore Ts'o via TUHS]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2025 at 02:07:54PM +0000, Ron Natalie via TUHS wrote:
> There were a number of reasons why Western Electric used Trade Secret rather
> than copyright.   Some of it was due to the nature of Bell Labs.
> Other, is that when your protecting TECHNOLOGIC INFORMATION, trade secret
> allows you to stop that dissemination.   Copyright, only prohibits making
> copies, but not dissemination of the information and patents by their very
> nature require the information to be disclosed.

Sure, but only if the owner of that information.... doesn't
disseminate it, at least not without very specfic protections.  That
means no trying to patent the setuid bit (as soon as you do that, it's
no longer subject to trade secrets).  It means no publishing a paper
in CACM (as soon as you do that, the information in that paper is no
longer subject to trade secret).  And if you distribute tapes to people
without requiring them to make sure anyone else they might distribute
to must sign an NDA, it's not going to be protected.

MIT didn't want to get students to sign NDA's that might ihhibit their
ability to do future work, which is why MIT refused to sign a license
with the Methods and Concepts clause.  But if you believe that things
don't work that way, then the trade secret wasn't going to prevent the
dissemination of that technologic information.  

Effectively, Trade Secret is a bilateral thing, and is essentially
something that gets established via a contract.  In practice, there is
*very* little difference between Alice and Bob signing a contract
stating that Bob promises not to share the information (e.g., an NDA)
and Alice and Bob signing a contract stating something is a Trade
Secret.  In both cases there is *very* little Alice can do to hammer
Charlie under law if Charlie receives the information if Charlie
didn't sign a NDA or some other contract acknowledging that a
particular bit of information is a trade secret.

I've handled Trade Secrets before in my time.  Some of this was
pre-release information about Itanium.  In that case, the information
was in a orange-covered book, with large letters on the cover saying
that it was Intel Proprietary Information, and I had to sign a piece
of paper stating that I had received a numbered copy of the
information, and I had to promise not to share it and to keep it
locked up if I wasn't using it.

I've had colleagues who worked with pre-release information for the
Sony Playstation, and in that case the information had to be kept in a
locked room, and couldn't be taken out of the room --- and I've
handled U.S. government classified information that had fewer
protections that the Sony information was required to have.

This is not "publish it in CACM and then try to think that you can
stop dissemination about the technical information."  This is why when
the encryption key for DVD copy protection was published on the
internet, athough that was presumably trade secret informtion, there
was zilch that could be done to stop the dissemination of the
encryption key.

						- Ted