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From: brad@optilink.COM (Brad Yearwood)
Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: UC Berkeley Embroiled in Computer Software Lawsuit
Message-ID: <14162@optilink.COM>
Date: 31 Jan 93 05:44:27 GMT
References: <1993Jan26.221218.8133@igor.tamri.com> <106742@netnews.upenn.edu> <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA
Lines: 80
In article <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu>, gwh@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert) writes:
> In article <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:
> >
> >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.
>
We should also ask Mr. Bass to provide some substantiation for his claim
of 10KMY and $5G as relates to V7 or 32V. The consequences of this have
great entertainment potential. Did AT&T really pay their software people
$500K/year as might be inferred from your figures, or were the developers
just capitalized on a scale never before or since seen?
These dollar and man-year figures are only remotely approachable as you move
into the era of USG/USL and Sys. V. What is at issue is NOT Sys. V, it is V7
and 32V.
Support and marketing expenses cannot be at issue, because AT&T did _nothing_
to support or market V7 or 32V. After making a lot of phone calls, if you
were persistent, you could eventually find someone in AT&T who had the authority
to quote a fee of something like $22K, exchange license paperwork, take your
check, and send you a tape. Support consisted of man pages, two eventually
published issues of BSTJ, and the fact that Bell Labs' librarian would send
you copies of some relevant papers, whether you were a licensee or not.
I made the calls and got the quote in the relevant era, and I know what I'm
talking about. You cannot tell me that I am "to [sic] young" or parroting
folklore.
--- breaking away now from the direct Berkeley/USL issues ---
What measures should universities be required to take to avoid "unfair"
competition? Should they be required to burn or lock in vaults any software
which they develop? Or perhaps they should be required to take the time-
honored approach of bestowing exclusive commercial rights for tax-funded
developments to a well-connected coterie of nominally private interests?
Or perhaps university people should be prohibited from writing any code at all -
they should be required to deliver cleanroom specifications to cost-plus
contractors if an actual implementation is needed. Perhaps graduate students
should be shot upon delivery of their dissertations, lest they compete
"unfairly" with industrial researchers. (_What_ industrial researchers?
Good question.)
If you want to speculate about taxpayer dollars and Unix, then let's talk about
SVID compliance being specified in government procurements, and how this might
have locked out viable products, perhaps more cost-effective than Sys. V, which
happened to be proprietary both in specification and in implementation, or
which met some published specification other than the one which AT&T happened
to have the only available implementation of.
USL, their overpaid pugnacious twerp CEO, and their overreaching lawyers are
pissing in the Unix soup, and it's starting to taste worse than merely stale.
Maybe they're doing the world a favor by implicitly promoting a new generation
of hopefully-innovative proprietary software (like NT), and clever/independent
or innovative free software (like Linux and hopefully Hurd).
I have not stripped AT&T of any right by voting with my wallet against them
by slam-dunking my Universal Card. I still (foolishly, and against certain
direct investment interests) keep my long-distance service with them out of
gratitude for their (apparently fading) support of fundamental and applied
research, including the original Unix. They don't even make real telephones
any more - they sell crappy imported junk with previously unthinkable defects,
like a tone dialer which isn't phone-line-powered (won't function when the
battery poops out).
Brad Yearwood brad@optilink.com {uunet, pyramid}!optilink!brad
Petaluma, CA