[net.unix-wizards] secretmail and proper credit

don@allegra.UUCP (12/05/83)

To answer the question about secretmail, xsend and xget was based on a
knapsack scheme that has since been broken.  It was written at Bell
Labs by Peter Weinberger.

Unfortunately, the Berkeley manual contains "AUTHOR" entries only for
things hacked at Berkeley which is unfortunate since BTL and a number
of universities made fundamental contributions (U. of Sydney and U. of
Toronto in particular).

For example, relatively uninteresting programs like vfontinfo and
vgrind are proudly AUTHOR'ed.  The vtroff program itself was written at
Toronto by Mark Tilson, but his name has even been removed from the
source listing!  (It was there in an V6 version I used in grad school)
Additional work on vtroff was done at the University of Purdue.

davidson@sdcsvax.UUCP (12/07/83)

In addition to being considered breakable, I understand that the method used
for UNIX secretmail will not not support digital signatures.  Does anyone
know of a replacement for secretmail without these deficiencies, either
available now, or in the offing?

I'm glad someone mentioned the elimination of authors from the Berkeley
UNIX manual.  I've never heard anyone mention this except to complain
about it.  Is anyone on the Berkeley UNIX project listening?  (They might
also restore the dates of when each document was last modified.)

-Greg

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/08/83)

allegra!don points out that Mike Tilson's name was removed from vtroff
(or rather, some of its constituent pieces) at Berkeley.  This is even
more dubious than it sounds, because Berkeley almost certainly got that
software under the standard U of T distribution agreement, which quite
explicitly requires that proper credit be given.  (It *also* requires
that the stuff not be distributed without U of T's permission, although
this may perhaps have been granted quietly.)
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry

henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/17/83)

A small correction to a previous posting:  in my reply to allegra!don's
comments about proper credit for 4.xBSD software, I had followed his
attribution of vcat (the guts of vtroff) to Mike Tilson.  This wasn't
quite correct.  I was around U of T at the time but never had a clear
idea of exactly who had done what on vcat, and the passage of time
didn't help.  The proper credits for vcat are roughly as follows:

	Bill Reeves	most of vcat, and the font editor
	Tom Duff	the inner loop of vcat, in pdp11 assembler
	Rob Pike	the (unreleased) precursor to vcat (called vd)
	Mike Tilson	miscellaneous optimizations

The distributed source for vcat had Reeves, Pike, Tilson in the heading,
and Duff in the lone .s file.  My thanks to Rob Pike for refreshing my
memory on this.

Is anybody from Berkeley listening?  Could you perhaps dig out the
U of T licence you signed years ago and re-read the part about being
required to give proper credit?
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry