Elastic promises "open"—delivers proprietary

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