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Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!purdue!yuma!csn!raven!rcd From: rcd@raven.eklektix.com (Dick Dunn) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: AT&T or USL, and extrapolation Message-ID: <1992Jul23.064028@eklektix.com> Date: 23 Jul 92 06:40:28 GMT Organization: eklektix - Boulder, Colorado Lines: 27 The discussion about the BSDI lawsuit seems to be focusing on AT&T. These days, it's really USL which is responsible for the development (such as it is) and the licensing of UNIX systems. Now, my understanding is that USL isn't exactly a piece of AT&T but isn't exactly separate either. Can any- one explain the real nature of this neither-fishy-nor-foul relationship? It bears on things such as whether it means anything at all to protest by changing your long-distance service. Could any information actually trickle down/across to USL? (I doubt that it has much effect in the best case, but I'm wondering if it has any at all.) _ _ _ _ _ Next...There's been a lot of extrapolation from what is known about the lawsuit to what it might mean. People are off guessing how AT&T must think that nobody who's seen the inside of UNIX can do OS work without revealing trade secret and nobody's going to be able to work in the field any more... Let's hold on. The best we can say is that, to the typical reader among us, the suit simply Doesn't Make Sense. We don't know what it is that USL claims as violations--in fact, the defendants don't even know what the alleged violations are. It's one thing to be wary--and I think we'd all better watch this one carefully--but it's another thing to extrapolate from lack of facts or lack of substantive accusations to doomsday scenarios. There just isn't any justification for them (yet), and it would help us understand the facts if we didn't have to keep filtering out the uninformed guesses. -- Dick Dunn rcd@raven.eklektix.com -or- raven!rcd Boulder, Colorado ...The way to meet an impossible circumstance is with voluntary craziness.