Xref: utzoo misc.legal:5155 comp.misc:2745 comp.sys.att:3711 comp.sys.ibm.pc:17003
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!att!cbnews!mark
From: mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.misc,comp.sys.att,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: AT&T vs. CSS (PC/Tools)
Keywords: AT&T, lawsuit, CSS, PC/Tools
Message-ID: <625@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 5 Jul 88 16:01:02 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Columbus
Lines: 19

In article <36@gnosys.UUCP> gst@gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:
< Well, the story I heard, and it may have been from Mark Horton, who worked
< on the thing for two or three years after Bill Joy moved on to other projects
< at Berkeley, was that ex/vi *is* covered by the AT&T license EVEN THOUGH IT
< CONTAINS NOT A SINGLE LINE OF CODE FROM ED!!  The fact is that they started
< by hacking on the ed code, and even though they hollowed the thing out and
< dropped in a whole new entity, throwing away everything they had to begin,
< this is just the way the lawyers interpreted the letter of the agreement.

I don't normally read these newsgroups, but this message was brought to
my attention.

The fact is that somewhere around 5% or 10% of the code in vi is really
ed.  The buffer management mechanism, the ex command interface, and the
file I/O stuff, for example, are pretty much unchanged from ed.  For
this reason, vi and ex are covered by the AT&T UNIX license, and cannot
be considered public domain.

	Mark Horton