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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA252 ; Sun, 31 Jan 93 13:59:29 EST Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!soda.berkeley.edu!gwh From: gwh@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert) Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: UC Berkeley Embroiled in Computer Software Lawsuit Date: 29 Jan 1993 18:41:51 GMT Organization: Dis- Lines: 78 Sender: gwh@soda.berkeley.edu Message-ID: <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <1993Jan26.221218.8133@igor.tamri.com> <106742@netnews.upenn.edu> <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu Summary: Challenge to John Bass. In article <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes: >I picked 3 of the many postings and letters to respond to. If this doesn't >get the point across we will have to start the trial here by taking each >and every source module and picking it apart until people get the idea >that Berkeley screwed up big time. Please do so. I'm not going to be personally satisfied until I see this sort of evidence, and lacking any access to AT&T source, I can't do it myself. >Unfortunately, it appears that most the respondants are to young to have >any actual memory of the events first hand ... and are just parroting >the folklore they have learned. Ad homoneim, John. Stick to either facts or philosophy of intellectual protection. >Many of the others just lack critical thinking and social skills necessary >to properly evalutate to issues and respond in a responsible way. See above. >Protection of these rights is absolutely necessary to protect not only >the computer industry, but the entire technical, information, publishing >and entertainment industries as well. No matter how much the newbies want >free/low cost UNIX, 386BSD is a direct violation of AT&T/USL property >rights. > >To strip AT&T of the right to protect it's UNIX property is wrong, no matter >how much you may hate AT&T or the Bell System. To bully their employees, >or picket their booths or offices, or any other action regarding their >attempt to protect their investment of more than 10,000 man years and >$5,000,000,000 expenses to develop, support, and market this product -- >is simply as flawed and wrong as the UCB team that plagiarized UNIX >components for the Net2 and 386BSD releases. UCB has not, will not, can >not EVER invest this amount of man power or dollars to make a software >product -- if not for any other reason than the people of California will >not allow their taxes to be spent competing unfairly with private business. John, I hereby challenge you to demonstrate publically that any code from Berkeley's Net/2 distribution is close enough to any AT&T version that it's plagarism and copyright infringement. Note that "general form" wont' cut it, under any interpretation of copyright law as I understand it. I want to see procedures that are the exact same, or just have had variable names altered, or something similar. Or a damn good argument as to why two pieces of code that do the same thing, but are written from scratch by two seperate people at different places, are covered under one copyright, and examples thereof. Even more annoying is your insistance that UCB computer science graduates might be "tainted" by the "blatant CSRG copyright violations", especially since you at the same time are insisting that holding USL employees to task for what we believe are wrongdoings of their company is morally wrong. I smell a significant morality bias here, and I don't like it. And, as to wether UCB has ever invested the manpower to build software products, well, you're wrong. I can think of a couple off the top of my head. Sounds to me like you're speaking from a position of ignorance about UCB's activities over the last fifteen years. There are perfectly professional ways to argue USL's case; so far, you aren't doing any of them. You allege that USL is right, but refused to provide the evidence that, if provided, WILL change at least my (and almost certainly every other rational Usenet readers) opinion on the case. The evidence will come out sooner or later and I'd prefer it be sooner; either CSRG lied about legally making BSD AT&T-Free, or USL is lying about how close the similarities are. In either case, some pretty serious shit is going to come down on someone when the evidence is available. The code will tell, but as of yet it hasn't. So let the code speak. -george william herbert gwh@lurnix.com gwh@soda.berkeley.edu