bicker@hoqax.UUCP (The Resource, Poet of Quality) (06/30/88)
> In article <166@skep2.ATT.COM>, wcs@skep2.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart.<ho95c>) writes: > > b) MKS has ported some UNIX tools and reimplemented others and is presumably > > following the rules for the products they use, This raises a question in my mind in light of all the talk about SEA suing PK Ware over the "look" of the archive tools. If SEA has a case doesn't AT&T? -- /kohn/brian.c AT&T Bell Laboratories Semantic Engineering Center The Resource, Poet of Quality ...ihnp4!hoqam!bicker (201) 949-5850 "It is useless for sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while wolves remain of a different opinion." - Wm. Ralph Inge, D.D.
hedrick@aramis.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) (07/02/88)
Look and feel isn't as general as you're implying. In general, all people copyright is their actual code. If you're tricky, you may be able to patent the actual function that is being done, so that somebody could reimplement it and still be covered. (This is normally done only for applications that involve special-purpose hardware, but there is sometimes a way of describing what looks to most of us like software as a piece of hardware that happens to contain a memory that is running this program. You'd have to talk to a lawyer to figure out how far this can really be pushed.) But patents are a pain to deal with and this isn't often done. The look and feel stuff is normally done by copyrighting the thing as an audio-visual work. This means in effect that it is being treated as a work of art and you're copyrighting the displays. I think this is highly questionable even for the cases where it is being tried, but I've never heard of anyone trying it with a standard Unix utility, which isn't display-oriented. And even if you succeeded, somebody could produce something that did the same thing and had a different display format. As far as I know, nobody has yet produced a legal theory under which the behavior, as contrasted with the code, of a Unix utility can be protected.
wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul) (07/02/88)
In article <1624@hoqax.UUCP> bicker@hoqax.UUCP (The Resource, Poet of Quality) writes: >> In article <166@skep2.ATT.COM>, wcs@skep2.ATT.COM (Bill.Stewart.<ho95c>) writes: >> >b) MKS has ported some UNIX tools and reimplemented others and is presumably >> > following the rules for the products they use, > >This raises a question in my mind in light of all the talk about >SEA suing PK Ware over the "look" of the archive tools. If SEA has >a case doesn't AT&T? It remains to be seen whether SEA has a case. They think so, obviously. I'm still not convinced that they base their case on look & feel, though. Reports quoted on the Net vary quite a bit as to what the issue really is. In any case, it seems to me that AT&T has chosen not to make look & feel an issue in the case of UNIX utilities: they have long ignored such UNIX look-alike products as Coherent, Idris, Minix, QNX, and even MS-DOS (DOS mkdir looks & feels a lot like UNIX mkdir to me :-)). It should also be reiterated what Alex White of MKS said recently: NONE of the MKS Toolkit utilities are PORTED -- they are all re-implementations, containing no AT&T source whatsoever. -- Wolf N. Paul * 3387 Sam Rayburn Run * Carrollton TX 75007 * (214) 306-9101 UUCP: killer!dcs!wnp ESL: 62832882 DOMAIN: wnp@dcs.UUCP TLX: 910-380-0585 EES PLANO UD
david@bdt.UUCP (David Beckemeyer) (07/09/88)
In article <132@dcs.UUCP> wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul) writes: >It should also be reiterated what Alex White of MKS said recently: NONE of the >MKS Toolkit utilities are PORTED -- they are all re-implementations, containing >no AT&T source whatsoever. This also goes for Micro C-Shell. There is no AT&T code or Berkeley source to be found in any of the Micro C-Shell utilities. Everything is a "from-scratch" re-write. It would be nearly impossibly to move the actual UNIX source to programs like csh to MS-DOS anyway. -- David Beckemeyer (david@bdt.uucp) | "Yea I've got medicine..." as the Beckemeyer Development Tools | cookie cocks a his Colt, "and if 478 Santa Clara Ave, Oakland, CA 94610 | you don't keep your mouth shut, I'm UUCP: {unisoft,sun}!hoptoad!bdt!david | gonna give you a big dose of it!"