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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA675 ; Sat, 06 Feb 93 20:00:43 EST Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!caen!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!emory!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!ncrhub2!ncrgw2!psinntp!lupine!mellon From: mellon@ncd.com (Ted Lemon) Newsgroups: alt.suit.att-bsdi,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: George William Herbert's Challenge - Part 3 (Let the code speak) Message-ID: <MELLON.93Feb4200049@pepper.ncd.com> Date: 5 Feb 93 04:00:49 GMT References: <106742@netnews.upenn.edu> <1993Jan27.215738.12384@igor.tamri.com> <1kbtpf$e9h@agate.berkeley.edu> <1993Feb3.095304.3744@igor.tamri.com> Sender: news@NCD.COM Followup-To: alt.suit.att-bsdi Organization: Network Computing Devices, Inc. Lines: 35 Nntp-Posting-Host: pepper In-reply-to: jbass@igor.tamri.com's message of 3 Feb 93 09:53:04 GMT You claim that AT&T has invested on the order of a billion dollars in Unix, whereas Berkeley clearly has not, and therefore AT&T should be allowed to reap the profits of their investments. However, you gloss over two points. First, BSD received quite a bit of funding from DARPA over the years, for example to develop the TCP code. I don't know how much money they received, but I'm sure it was significant. Furthermore, you gloss over the effort expended by hundreds of volunteers all over the world who contributed to the system. I see no reason whatsoever to assume that less effort was expended at Berkeley than at AT&T, and in fact I think that the results indicate that whatever the expenditure in effort, the work done at Berkeley was qualitatively better. It's hardly Berkeley's fault that AT&T spent years spinning its wheels on crap like System V release 3.*. Secondly, you maintain that AT&T's billion dollars was spent on developing UNIX. This sounds very fishy to me, and is also somewhat irrelevant - a better measure would be to figure out how much AT&T had spent at the time that 32V was licensed to Berkeley - that was the last time that Berkeley had anything to do with AT&T's sources, and to claim that Berkeley might owe them for any subsequent Unix effort seems bizarre at best. Your arguments strike me as intellectually dishonest, and your claims that your "opponents" are ignoring the facts of the case strike me as the worst sort of ad hominem attack. I wonder what your real motivation is in arguing these points. _MelloN_ -- mellon@ncd.com uunet!lupine!mellon Member of the League for Programming Freedom. To find out how software patents may cost you your right to program, contact lpf@uunet.uu.net