7 Mar
2017
7 Mar
'17
12:31 a.m.
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