7 Mar
2017
7 Mar
'17
5:32 a.m.
Steve Johnson wrote:
I can attest to at least one case where AT&T
attempted to see whether
its Unix code had been stolen. A Unix look-alike came to AT&T's
attention, and they wanted to get a sense of whether the code had been
copied before bringing out the big legal guns. I was one of several
people asked to log into the system and see what I could figure out.
They particularly wanted me to look at their Yacc, because they assumed
that would be hard to duplicate.
So I spent an interesting hour checking it out. The first thing I did
was to look to see whether some of my bugs or unadvertised features were
in the program, and they weren't. Then I threw a couple of difficult
cases at it, and found a couple of bugs in their code. And besides, it
was VERY slow. So I concluded it was a reimplementation. I gather
that was the consensus of others as well, and AT&T backed off.
Steve
Coherent?