Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary [LWN.net]

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Feb 4, 2021 1:16 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary by nix
Parent article: Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Bear in mind that this is the real BSD licence - as in you must credit Berkeley...

But what happened was that, as part of their claim that Berkeley infringed AT&T copyrights, AT&T claimed ownership of utilities like vi. Berkeley promptly brought evidence that, not only was vi written at Berkeley not AT&T, but that the reason AT&T mistakenly claimed it was that they had deleted all evidence as to who owned the copyright!

That was why they capitulated so quickly, and wanted it all sealed - if they mistakenly claimed stuff that clearly belonged to other people, then they had no way to prove they owned anything, and even worse that lack of proof was down to the fact they themselves had destroyed it.

The settlement should be available on Groklaw somewhere - someone made a Freedom of Information request for it and sent it to PJ. In hindsight everyone was surprised no one had tried that earlier ...

Cheers,
Wol

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Feb 4, 2021 1:40 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Now the unanswerable question, of course: was this incompetence (which I can *easily* see), or malice backfiring (attempts to claim stuff as their own that really wasn't)...

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Feb 4, 2021 9:48 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Bear in mind that - in the US - they weren't part of Berne until 1984. It was therefore assumed that software was covered by contract and trade secret, not copyright. Also, when was GNU founded? Early 80s? Nearly all software prior to Berne/mid-80s was open source, as in when you bought a computer you got the software AND THE SOURCE to the software.

At some point late 70s early 80s I guess, especially given that AT&T was governed by the anti-trust rules that they weren't allowed to compete in the software business, it was *company* *policy* that all software should be supplied without copyright notices (seeing as it was believed copyright didn't apply).

Problem was, Unix as supplied by AT&T contained a LOT of code from three University sources - Berkeley who claimed copyright, that Australian university who's name I always forget, and University College London, for whom the latter two copyright definitely DID apply.

So the Judge's guidance before making a ruling said "AT&T have deleted the copyright notices, therefore it's down to AT&T to prove they own the code". Seeing as I guess they didn't have a decent and long-standing backup system to prove where the code came from, they threw in the towel pretty quick, rather than have the Judge rule that they couldn't prove they owned it therefore they didn't. Hence the extreme secrecy over the settlement ... the Emperor had no clothes ...

Cheers,
Wol

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Feb 4, 2021 10:02 UTC (Thu) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

Possibly University of New South Wales - John Lions was there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lions

Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

Posted Feb 5, 2021 20:56 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Where AT&T (and SCO) failed was in not obfuscating the fraud well enough, and choosing to make an enemy of a large, well-organised group instead of trampling individuals. For a success story, see VMware.

Incidentally, this sort of scam is now the main business model of the “music rights societies” (a euphemism if there ever was one) feeding off of Youtube's automated system. Make a throwaway shell company with a name that looks like it was algorithmically generated itself, upload recordings of white noise, covers of other people's music, microphones pointed at bird feeders, and monetise, monetise, monetise. The system they abuse is built to be a death march for anyone coming in at the other side (Google will do anything to avoid employing real humans to support their products), so this is virtually consequence-free.