Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site amd.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!amd!eager From: eager@amd.UUCP (Mike Eager) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: UNIX trademark registration Message-ID: <760@amd.UUCP> Date: Wed, 19-Dec-84 20:26:45 EST Article-I.D.: amd.760 Posted: Wed Dec 19 20:26:45 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 20-Dec-84 04:17:25 EST References: <6557@brl-tgr.ARPA> Organization: AMD Applications, Santa Clara, CA Lines: 36 > How is AT&T able to claim trade secret over something like 4.2BSD? > If you diff 4.2BSD source with V.2 source, you will find that > a great deal of the code is not the same. [As long as there are multiple postings to the net, I might as well add my comments, too!] I'm not privy to what the people at Berkeley or ATT are doing with unix, but I can offer one comment about the differences. I added the VPATH feature of System V make to the 4.2BSD make. As part of investigating how VPATH (which seems to be undocumented) works, I diff'd the two versions of make. Wow, what a mess! Everything changed! Complete rewrite! Well, I looked closer. Yes it is mostly a re-write, but for reasons I could not fathom. The routine names are the same, as are most of the variables. The packaging into files is a little different. The formatting of the source is quite different. Where one uses explicit structure references, the other uses a typedef which references the structure. In sum, they both work in the identical same fashion, and one is clearly the copy of the other, but they are not identical. It seems that they were made different for various philosophical and esoteric reasons, which makes it difficult to relate a fix for one to the other. If there were trade secret protection in one, the process of reformatting the code does not remove the trade secret protection in the other. I wonder how much the two versions really differ, and how much the differences are just a facade. [It is irrelevant to the trade secret question -- if trade secrets were used in the development of a product, the owner of the trade secret has valid claim to protection of the derived product. You have to take public info (Vol. 1 & 2)and do a complete rewrite, without looking at the protected source. Like was done for Coherent.] -- Mike Eager (amd!eager)