Newsgroup: alt.suit.att-bsdi

In article <1992Aug3.143259.23897@crd.ge.com> davidsen@crd.ge.com (bill davidsen) writes:
>  It seems to me that the university was not really trying to solve the
>issue when they refused to let a mutually agreed third party examing the
>whole body of code. By insisting on snapshots they give the appearance
>of trying to hide something, even if they're not.
Trying to play the devil's advocate, I can see why BSDI could be afraid
of such a comparison.  A third party examining the whole body of the
source code, would definitely find many similarities between the BSDI
and the AT&T version.  I think that the directory structure, the split
into modules, and the filenames would be similar between the two
systems.  The third party could argue, that that top level hierarchical
organisation was based on the AT&T code.  It could furthermore argue,
that the top level organisation was a major and significant part of the
propriety system.

>  When this started I thought the major legitimate complaint was that
>BSDI was using the word UNIX pretty freely in its literature. Now that
>so much effort is going into avoiding a fair evaluation of the entire
>body of the code, I am willing to accept the possibility the BSDI has
>used some UNIX code in their implementation.
I doubt it:  since the BSDI source code is part of their distribution
it would be very unwise to include AT&T code in it.  Either some code
was left there by mistake, or AT&T will claim that they copied something
more general, like the system structure (see above).

Diomidis
-- 
Diomidis Spinellis    Internet: <dds@doc.ic.ac.uk>    UUCP: ...!ukc!icdoc!dds
Department of Computing, Imperial College, London SW7     #include "/dev/tty"

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