7 Mar
2017
7 Mar
'17
12:44 a.m.
I don't remember. In fact, I'm not sure I ever knew...
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Cory Smelosky" <b4(a)gewt.net>
To:
Cc:"TUHS main list" <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Mon, 06 Mar 2017 15:32:41 -0800
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Source code abundance?
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?