Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!att-out!cbnewsj!dwex From: dwex@mtgzfs3.att.com (David E. Wexelblat) Subject: Re: 4.4BSD Release Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1993 17:40:04 GMT Message-ID: <CA612w.8Ew@cbnewsj.cb.att.com> References: <20251@smoke.brl.mil> <21juef$ri6@agate.berkeley.edu> <1993Jul14.075929@eklektix.com> Sender: news@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (NetNews Administrator) Nntp-Posting-Host: mtgz058.gaz.att.com Lines: 51 In article <1993Jul14.075929@eklektix.com> rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn) writes: > bostic@toe.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic) writes: > [discussion of copyright stuff--Vern Schryver, Doug Gwyn] > >...I believe that > >USL/AT&T/Novell is required to credit the University of > >California for the 4BSD software that they ship, and I don't > >think that they do. > > One wonders if AT&T has some generic problem in respecting other folks' > copyrights. I remember a former office-mate working on some X joint > project with AT&T, and nearly going ballistic when he saw the AT&T folks > yanking MIT copyrights out of source files as they moved them around. I > don't want to paint AT&T with a broad brush...there are good folks and bad > folks, but it seems not too difficult to find sleazy subcultures. > > It's not as if it's a big deal to retain either Berkeley or MIT copyright > notices; they don't require anything more than acknowledgment and common > decency. I wonder what the folks who were trashing copyright notices were > afraid of...and yes, the hypocrisy is pretty blatant. > -- > Dick Dunn rcd@eklektix.com -or- raven!rcd Boulder, Colorado USA > ...Simpler is better. Please don't generalize like this. For one thing, AT&T policy on such things make this a dismissable offence, as far as I know. Second, even if AT&T allowed people to get away with such things, NOT all AT&T employees think this way. Take a look at XFree86. We are extremely careful with both copyright issues and author/originator credit. And the policies that keep this happening were largely at MY insistence, an AT&T employee. If I worked in a culture where ripping off other people's work was condoned, do you think I'd be so careful about preserving copyrights? Or, if you want to say "that's you, not AT&T", that I would continue to work at a company that condones such things? Take a look at our code. XFree86 is derived from Thomas Roell's X386, but it has evolved in many, many areas. Yet all of Thomas' code retains his copyright. And derivative code lists Thomas and the new author(s) as copyright holders. Just because companies sometimes employee people with, ummm, "loose" ethics doesn't mean that the company itself, or everyone who works for it, has the same ethical problems. -- David Wexelblat <dwex@mtgzfs3.att.com> (908) 957-5871 Fax: (908) 957-5305 AT&T Bell Laboratories, 200 Laurel Ave - 3F-428, Middletown, NJ 07748 XFree86 requests should be addressed to <xfree86@physics.su.oz.au> "Just remember that the gold's for us to capture all we want" -- Yes, Your Move