Slashdot Mirror
Do You Know UNIX Secrets?
ESR writes "You can help stop the SCO attack on IBM and the Linux community.
I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally
nullified.
I want to know if you have ever had read access to proprietary Unix
source code (not just binaries and documentation) under circumstances
where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever
non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced. To help out, see my No Secrets page."
But then I'd have to kill -9 you.
This is the book which shows the roots of Unix: Lion's Commentary on UNIX 6th Ed. with source code
In 1973, UNIX had a secret affair with MULTIX. The resulting child was put up for adoption, and the whole thing was hushed up.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
So let's get this... ESR wants to know where the NDA wasn't enforced. So he's looking for someone who's copied code from the Unix source tree into something else and got away with it. Isn't that what's called admitting your culpabilty? And when SCO serves papers on ESR for that information which he has garnered? Oh, you too can have your day in court. Woohoo.
The point is, it's been basically otu in the open for decades already... so yes, you can't take it and make a product with it... copyright prevents it.
But the source code to various versions of unix has been widely available to anyone who wanted it, and none of the previous copyright holders of it even really cared.
SCO cannot claim trade secret violations for somethign that has been common knowledge for well over 10 years.
Yes, 2 wrongs don't make a right, and merely taking something and publishing it doesn't make trade secret invalid.. but if I publish your trade secret stuff, and it gets re published for a full DECADE, you can't come in 10 years later and claim your "secrets" have been leaked.. it's not a secret anymore.
It the difference between showing a signed petition with thousands of signatures, vs citing a poll that X% of the constituents is for or against somethng.
To run for office you need signed patitions not just a few pollsters saying you are popular.
Help fight continental drift.
HE WROTE the OSI position paper, you dimwit!
If the claim is that the system needs to be stricken of all SCO *owned* code. Isn't the first argument: What code do you really own, what happened in the AT&T Case (open the court files) show us what needs to be changed BEFORE a lawsuit ever took place.
The technical community is VERY good at solving these sorts of problems. Even if we are talking 6-18 months time to rewrite all the sources they are claiming are in violation. That's much shorter than this court case with IBM is going to be.
Besides, even if they are not *really* in violation. And there are claims for both sides, if they were re-written, SCO loses their lawyer money, and we can go back to ragging on M$-Wintel-DMCA and the US court system.
The only case in which access to source code would be of interest would be if SCO or its predecessors made the code available themselves, without requiring an NDA. That could be accidental (putting it up for FTP on a public site) or deliberate (publication in a book, sending it to a university research group).
In all other cases, access to it would probably be in breach of either NDAs or computer crime laws. For example, if you had access to SCO source code through your employer, you are covered through their NDA. If you made your own copy of it, you and your employer might be in a lot of trouble. If SCO or someone else accidentally left open an NFS mount with the source tree (as has happened in the past), you'd probably be guilty of computer hacking if you tried to access it. So, be careful of what you admit to.
Overall, I think people should just ignore SCO and go about their business until SCO comes forward with concrete claims. There is no need to spin our wheels or waste any amount of time on this right now. After SCO makes concrete claims, any reasonable judge should give the open source community ample time to respond, and SCO's secretiveness and unwillingness to let people fix whatever they are complaining about probably only hurts their case.
There are three problems here.
"under circumstances where either no non-disclosure agreement was required or whatever non-disclosure agreement you had was not enforced."
Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void- in fact, many/most NDAs specifically say "lack of enforcement does not nullify this agreement".
I'm looking for ways to prove that Unix trade secrets have been legally nullified
Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
Problem #3: It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel. This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...and it can only, in fact, cause damage, because you're implying there IS code that belongs to SCO that "we" need to find a way to justify its presence in the kernel...when in fact no such code exists.
By the way, why are people wasting time "helping" IBM? They don't need it, nor do they deserve it- they're "into" Linux because it makes them money, not because they wanna be friends, or they think it's "cool"...and with legal "help" like this, who needs SCO? Dispute the claims intelligently, boycott SCO, whatever- just leave the legal arguments to the lawyers, or you just might end up helping SCO...and IBM won't be the only loser if that happens.
I can hear the SCO execs and lawyers now: "See? They DID steal our code, now they're trying to find a loophole!"
Please help metamoderate.
Posing as ESR to try to get people to incriminate themselves is a pretty nice trick. But we're not falling for it!
Flat5
Back in the mid '80's, when I was working for U S WEST, the Amdahl machine I and a bunch of other engineers had logins on had the /src files all open (read only).
I used my access to the source of that version of UNIX (UTS) source a lot to help me with the Xenix system I was running at home.
Thing is, my racall of this is flakey enough that I cannot provide actual dates that the source on the "PN1" machine was open (about a one year window, after we moved from an IBM to an Amdahl mainframe, probably around 1985-86).
I don't think that's good enough, though, to have any effect on the SCO v IBM case.
(I wonder if the fact that U S WEST used to be a part of the Bell System - I went to U S WEST from Bell Labs, Holmdel - possibly made us feel a "part of the UNIX family" so we didn't seem to be as strict about holding the source inviolate. I dunno.)
This project, therefore, is entirely moot, at least in regards to the SCO lawsuit...
I think you understand the most literal level, but I think you're missing the logic. I think you're right, this doesn't have anything to do with the lawsuit. I think this is punitive . I think this is a side-project, to punish SCO for violating community standards, no matter what happens to the lawsuit.
As such the rest of your concerns are irrelevant, since as you yourself say this has nothing to do with the lawsuit.
This is a long-term project, to establish the danger of messing with the UNIX community, to make anybody else in the future who thinks they can milk money from the community, or that a lawyer-spasm is preferable to simply going out of business, think twice because they can expect the community to lash out not just in rhetoric, but with legal manuevers of their own. Textbook deterrence.
I'm not ESR and I don't know. But that's how I read this, and I think it's a great idea. May not go anywhere but if it works it's very poetic and appropriate payback.
During the times I was involved with actual Unix source code (mid 1970's to mid 1980's) for three different employers (UCLA, SDC, Tektronix) there was nothing similar to a nda. The school or company just agreed to not give source code access to non-"employees", and "employees" agreed not to give access to others who hadn't agreed to the Bell license.
Within those terms, there was a lot of access. At the yearly conferences (which later became USENIX) there was a typically conference distribution tape. That tape was a mixture of "new" things, and modifications to the Unix kernel or Unix commands. To assure that everybody was "licensed", when you first became a member you submitted a copy of the signature page of the license.
During that time we went from V6 Unix, PWB Unix, V7 Unix, to 2BSD (pdp11) and 4BSD (vax).
Sharing went both ways of course. A number of changes/new cmds from other groups became part of the Official Bell release.
That sharing was a factor in the settlement of the USL vs UCBerkeley lawsuit, that ended in the free availability of the 386bsd work.
I was at Bell Labs for almost three years in the early 1980's, moving over to AT&T Information Systems after the court ordered breakup of AT&T in 1984 or so.
They were pretty laid back then; I may have signed an NDA but I certainly don't recall it. I do recall the usual W4 and Insurance BS but an NDA doesn't stick out.
And yes, I had almost full access to the source tree. IIRC, only some arcane kernel stuff wasn't available, being crafted in assembly. But given the corporate culture I have no doubt it was somehow accessable, but because it was processor / architecture specific, I never bothered looking for it. Plenty of stuff to look at and learn from at higher levels.
Source code was available to any member of technical staff and since it was my second job out of Uni I had a ball. I even dl'ed some source to my Osborne I so I could read it at my lesiure.
In fact I didn't realise how special it was at the time to have access to Unix source code until maybe five years later when I'd moved over to Wall Street.
The Street was ramping up sharply on tech in those days, and Unix (think Sun, NeXt and SGI workstations) was the only game in town since PCs were still pretty underpowered.
I remember someone asking me a question, and I told him to "grep for it". He looked at me cryptically, and then it hit me.
No way to grep Dude - they's binary distributions.
A message from our sponsor
The University of Southern California had a project in 1981-1982 to port UNIX from a VAX 780 to the Data General MV8000 (from "The Soul of a New Machine") using about 20 grad students. To my knowledge, none of the students (including me) had to sign anything to work on the project, and we certainly had access to the full source. One of the other guys was Fred Cohen, who has been widely credited with coining the term " computer virus".
And Solaris isn't System V Release 4?! Gee...I guess Sun have been lying to me :-p
SunOS Release 5.7 [UNIX(R) System V Release 4.0]
The first line line of text that appears when the kernel loads. So you're right.
Problem #1: Just because it wasn't enforced at one time, doesn't mean the NDA is null and void
No, it doesn't. But if you can prove that the Unix-company in charge of those NDAs actually did not protect their trade secrets, that is very nice. If they released it into the public by neglect of their own NDA, they are at fault. Now if the signer of that NDA did anything wrong (regardless of sloppy enforcement or not), that would be another matter...
Problem #2: Disproving "trade secret" status is pointless(not to mention, unlikely to happen). It's still copyright SOMEONE ELSE, and YOU CAN'T USE IT unless they let you!
No, but you can write your own implementation of anything copyrighted (it's not a patent), something you could not legally do with a trade secret you have knowledge of. Now if SCO is claiming that IBM went copy-paste, you would be right. But last I heard they were throwing around FUD like "stealing ideas from proprietary SCO code and incorporating into Linux". To gather all information that was, is and has been publicly available, you show that there was in fact not a trade secret and so, nothing could have been stolen.
Problem #3: It's been said time+time again, there is no proprietary code that belongs to SCO in the Linux kernel.
So you say. SCO says otherwise. Which is why we're going to court, isn't it? Where the hell do you get the divine knowledge to know that noone anywhere ever fell for the temptation to copy-paste a little? Oh, right you've been listening to 10,000 posts to slashdot on how that *can't* be the case. Nevermind...
By the way, why are people wasting time "helping" IBM? (...) and with legal "help" like this, who needs SCO? Dispute the claims intelligently, boycott SCO, whatever- just leave the legal arguments to the lawyers, or you just might end up helping SCO...and IBM won't be the only loser if that happens.
SCO has threatened to sue Everybody(tm) right down to your favorite Linux distro, and if you're a Linux user, you too. If you want to pretend IBM is the only one that could get hurt here, think again. The SCO execs and lawyers are going "Damn. They're calling our bluff. Again. Better send out a troll to slashdot to keep them from counting the cards."
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was a in the platinum beta test program for Solaris at the time, and the question of it being made open source came up when I was visiting. Sun was actually interested in making all of the Solaris source available to NDA-signing clients, but found themselves unable to do so for legal reasons.
Over the years, over 100 subcontractors, some of which no longer exist as companies, were involved in writing the code that makes up Solaris. It was impossible for Sun to get the okay from all those subcontractors to make those pieces of the source available to clients outside of Sun, and I suspect it quickly became a logistical nightmare of tracking which pieces of code were subject to which legal agreements with subcontractors, who had the IP rights of any subcontractors that were defunct, and so on.
If you think that ESR is "finally" getting things in gear, then you haven't seen his OSI Position Paper. The initial draft of this was released 4 days after the initial lawsuit.
Those of you who have read it awhile back may want to look again. A fair amount has changed in the past week or so.
the no
Where did you get that.
Nobody is saying that you can steal... there is a difference between trade secret stuff and just "How we did that thing".
SCO is not "locking down their IP rights". THey are trying to assert IP rights they do NOT have.
You CANNOT claim to have a "trade secret" if everyone and his pet duck has had virtually unfettered access to it for TEN years. SCO did not have anything that EVERYONE did not already know, was taught in universities, etcetera.. that's the point.
This has nothing to do with RMS.
This is about asking if anyone in the past has had access, legally, to the unix source in any form where they did not have to sign NDAS, or where the NDAS were consciously overlooked by the rightsholder in the first place. Why? So they can help show that SCO is making baseless claims (which any idiot can see that they are)
BUT IN 1994 Novell who then fully owned UnixWare...From the Usenet Archives
Did Novell, who at that time owned the Unixware source, put some of the code into GPL'ed Linux to remain compatable with UNIX binaries?Time to dig up those old copies of Byte and PC Weekly.
SunOS (later the WIndowed version was called Solaris 1.x) up until 4.x was BSD 4.3 system...it was NOT a "free BSD" derivative, whatever you mean.
Solaris 2.x+ is very much System V Release 4. Sun were a member of that collective and Solaris still retains that structure.
You might want to check your facts.
-psy