Yes, Doug is spot on. Being told by the govt. that we had to patent everything we could and license it fairly got rather strange when software was involved -- there was a lot of question whether software could be patented at all, and the Labs had to patent software if it could be patented (e.g., the setuid bit).

The biggest issue, which still hasn't gone away, is that software moves so much faster than the law. The lawyers seemed to take the standpoint that if something was questionable, just wait for five years until there are better legal precedents.

At one point I made a major push to get the PCC grammar for C released in the public domain. I still think this would have brought standardization about much sooner, and my managers were in favor of it. But the lawyers delayed and delayed. The next thing you know, we had "far pointers" and all sorts of other gook in the language that took the standards committee additional years to wring out. Sigh...

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From:
"Doug McIlroy" <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu>

To:
<tuhs@tuhs.org>
Cc:

Sent:
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 15:33:10 -0400
Subject:
Re: [TUHS] System Economics

"Open" was certainly not a work heard in the Unix lab,
where our lawyers made sure we knew it was a "trade secret".
John Lions was brought into the lab both because we admired
his work and because the lawyers wanted to reel that work
back in-house.

Out in the field, the trade secret was treated in many
different ways. Perhaps the most extreme was MIT, whose
lawyers believed it could not be adequately protected in
academia and forbade its use there. I don't know what eventually broke the logjam.

Doug