32V basically declared public domain by USL-BSD judge

Posted Dec 22, 2003 20:46 UTC (Mon) by freeio (guest, #9622)
Parent article: Holiday cheer from the SCO Group

Dennis Ritchie's web site has the following link to the 1994 USL-BSD judgement:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bsdi/930303.ruling.txt

Note that the judge, in essence, stated that 32V was neither copyrighted, nor could it contain any trade secrets, due to the mishandling of the licensing and labelling by AT&T. As such, anything which is identical to the files in 32V is quite legal to use or copy, without any attribution whatsoever.

From a legal standpoint, SCO has an impossibly high barrier to overcome in the face of the 1994 ruling.

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32V basically declared public domain by USL-BSD judge

Posted Dec 24, 2003 14:07 UTC (Wed) by tseaver (guest, #1544) [Link]

I particularly like this quote from the opinion, which seems eerily like
what Linus had already done:

> There is an enormous difference between an expert
> programmer sitting down with a pile of textbooks and disjointed
> segments of code to write out an operating system from scratch, and
> that same programmer downloading the operating system intact from a
> public network. In the first case, the programmer could expend
> large amounts of time writing, testing, and debugging the
> newly-created system, with an uncertain prospect of immediate
> success. But in the second case, immediate success would be
> virtually assured. Thus, even if all of the pieces of the 32V code
> had been thoroughly revealed in publicly available literature, the
> overall organization of the code might remain a trade secret unless
> it too had been disclosed.