On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 3:18 PM, <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

I mostly watched the whole AT&T/BSD lawsuit stuff from the side. At
one USENIX I remember talking to Keith Bostic about it, and understanding
that it was trade secret, but I asked him "Given the book by Maurice
Bach on how UNIX works, how can they still think it's trade secret?"
He just sorta nodded and said "yep" or something equivalent.

Not a lawyer... but for patents, I am under the impression that the date is defined as "first public discloser." So I think the official date would be the UNIX talk given in "paper presented at the Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, October 15-17, 1973." [https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html]

I believe that said paper predates all of the books. Fact is before Bach, UNIX shows up in a number of OS texts, so the point is that the IP is being taught by Universities and studies by students. Which is of course what the judge points out when the case was decided.

And clearly, the legal battle was stupid. But pride is an amazing thing and corporate pride seems the worst in my experience.

all quite sad.

Clem