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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA618 ; Sat, 06 Feb 93 01:02:04 EST Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!destroyer!fmsrl7!lynx.unm.edu!zia.aoc.nrao.edu!laphroaig!cflatter From: cflatter@nrao.edu (Chris Flatters) Subject: Re: George William Herbert's Challenge - Part Message-ID: <1993Feb3.212408.2942@zia.aoc.nrao.edu> Sender: news@zia.aoc.nrao.edu Reply-To: cflatter@nrao.edu Organization: NRAO References: <1993Feb3.175211.13214@igor.tamri.com> Date: Wed, 3 Feb 93 21:24:08 GMT Lines: 39 There are several problems with John Bass' arguments. 1) John contends that "methodology and algorithms, including the sequence of processes adopted by the programmer" are protected. In support of this he cites the discussion of copyright from Numerical Recipes (Press at al., 1986). Press et al (or their lawyers) specifically and unambiguously exclude these from protection: "Copyright does not protect ideas, but only the expression of those ideas in a particular form. In the case of a computer program, the ideas consist of the program's methodology and algorithm, including the sequence of processes adopted by the programmer. The expression of these ideas is the program source code and its derived object code." (Numerical Recipes, 1st edn, p xiii) This clearly contradicts John's argument. 2) The publicly known parts of the USL suite may cover assertions that range from USL believing NET2 contains code that is a trivial modification (eg. renaming of variables or resizing of arrays) to USL believing that they have copyright protection for the general organization of the UNIX source code. USL don't want to make their exact claims known (for whatever reason) and we are unlikely to find out what the scope of the claims are until they have their day in court. So far there is no reason to believe that anyone has accused UCB or BSDI of anything as broad as John asserts. 3) John confuses the Jolitz' 386BSD with BSDI's BSD/386. These are seperate developments. So far (unless I missed something in the trade rags) the USL lawsuit has not been broadened to include 386BSD. This together with the timing of the lawsuit and the allusions to conspiracy suggests that it is BSDI's intent to commercialize BSD that has provoked USL's actions (I believe that several members of CSRG have interests in BSDI and I know that Bill Jolitz parted ways with CSRG since he believed that the decontaminated BSD source code should be freely distributable). Chris Flatters cflatter@nrao.edu