32V basically declared public domain by USL-BSD judge

Posted Dec 24, 2003 14:07 UTC (Wed) by tseaver (guest, #1544)
In reply to: 32V basically declared public domain by USL-BSD judge by freeio
Parent article: Holiday cheer from the SCO Group

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.