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
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
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
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.
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.