UNIX trademark registration

[Mike Eager]

> How is AT&T able to claim trade secret over something like 4.2BSD?
> If you diff 4.2BSD source with V.2 source, you will find that
> a great deal of the code is not the same.  

[As long as there are multiple postings to the net, I might as well add my
 comments, too!]

I'm not privy to what the people at Berkeley or ATT are doing with unix, but
I can offer one comment about the differences.  I added the VPATH feature of
System V make to the 4.2BSD make.  As part of investigating how VPATH (which
seems to be undocumented) works, I diff'd the two versions of make.   Wow,
what a mess!  Everything changed!  Complete rewrite!  

Well, I looked closer.  Yes it is mostly a re-write, but for reasons I could
not fathom.  The routine names are the same, as are most of the variables.  The
packaging into files is a little different.  The formatting of the source is
quite different.  Where one uses explicit structure references, the other
uses a typedef which references the structure.  In sum, they both work in the
identical same fashion, and one is clearly the copy of the other, but they
are not identical.

It seems that they were made different for various philosophical and esoteric
reasons, which makes it difficult to relate a fix for one to the other.  If
there were trade secret protection in one, the process of reformatting the 
code does not remove the trade secret protection in the other.  I wonder
how much the two versions really differ, and how much the differences are 
just a facade.

[It is irrelevant to the trade secret question -- if trade secrets were used
in the development of a product, the owner of the trade secret has valid claim
to protection of the derived product.  You have to take public info (Vol. 1 & 2)and do a complete rewrite, without looking at the protected source.  Like was
done for Coherent.]

-- Mike Eager	(amd!eager)