decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
UNIX Methods and Concepts: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle, by Salus & Toomey
Friday, June 16 2006 @ 05:21 PM EDT

UNIX Methods and Concepts: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle

~ by Dr. Peter H. Salus and Warren K. Toomey, The UNIX Heritage Society

Recently, The SCO Group has asserted that IBM negligently leaked the methods and concepts in UNIX. What The SCO Group fails to realize is that, from day one, the methods and concepts in UNIX were out in the open. And, as AT&T found out when UNIX was commercialized, staunching the leakage of UNIX methods and concepts was like putting the proverbial genie back into the bottle.

Throughout the 1970-1980 decade, AT&T made no secret of the UNIX source code. After the system became "public," following the SOSP paper in October 1973 (and its publication in the July 1974 Communications of the ACM), there were many requests from outside AT&T for the new OS. The SOSP paper was itself very revealing of the UNIX methods and concepts, and AT&T at the time (following a consent decree) was obliged to confine its business to "telegraphy and telephony" and not to sell software products, but to license UNIX on a very open basis.

What the requesters received, from Ken Thompson and (later) from Irma Biren, was a 10" tape or a disk pack with the bits of 3rd Edition UNIX, or 4th, or 5th, or 6th. All the bits, not what we'd call a binary version, but the source. And many recipients just printed it out. The disk pack frequently came with a handwritten note: "Here's your RK05 , Love Ken"; on the tape that Lou Katz received, the note read: "Here's the tape, if it craps out, I'll cut another."

Further, from the beginning, Thompson would talk about the system and its code: for example, at the "UNIX Users' Meeting" at Columbia University on May 15, 1974. There were no barriers, no bars, no hurdles. And every site had full source.

It is important to note that UNIX was never a static system, and the userbase found it immensely useful to have the source code, so that the system could be fixed, and enhanced to suit the users at each individual site. Examples include the AUSAM system, developed at UNSW in Australia, and the early BSDs. The changes made by the users often found their way back into the main UNIX development tree. Significant portions of AUSAM code were still visible in System V in the late 1980s.

With a malleable OS in the hands of the users, including the source code, the users found the urge to exchange home-grown bug fixes and improvements to the system. Beginning in mid-1976, the UNIX Users' Group mailed out tapes of the "software exchange." The first was announced in the May-June "UNIX NEWS," the second followed in November, the third in May-June 1977. AT&T's attitude forced the users to exchange knowledge with one another. Mel Ferentz (then publisher of "UNIX NEWS") was driven to initiate the exchange, and Mike O'Brien (then a graduate student) to implement it.

Another avenue for the exchange of home-grown methods and concepts was at the annual UNIX User Group (later USENIX) conferences, where everybody bought two tapes, one full of new programs, device drivers and system patches, and the other tape empty (over 150 attendees at the May 1977 meeting in Urbana, IL).

After the creation of USENET in late 1979, the net.v6bugs and net.v7bugs newsgroups were formed so that users could exchange bug fixes on-line in the form of patches. These newsgroups were quite active, thus "leaking" many lines of original UNIX code.

Even the UNIX developers aided and abetted the free exchange of methods and concepts: Ken Thompson took a sabbatical at University of California, Berkeley where he introduced UNIX and it methods and concepts to the staff and students.

Then there is the case of the "50 bugs" tape. By the late 1970s, AT&T had started to impose more restrictive conditions in its UNIX licenses, stifling the exchange of UNIX code between licensees. The licenses also did not include the ability to obtain bug fixes from AT&T. The researchers at Bell Labs had found and fixed a significant number of bugs in UNIX, and Ken Thompson had tried to get the patches out, but the lawyers kept stalling him. Eventually, a tape with the patches was "found" by Lou Katz and Reidar Bornholdt on Mountain Avenue (the road leading to the Labs). Ken also "inadvertently" left an image of the tape at the University of Illinois, when visiting on his way to Berkeley, and another at Berkeley.

While the ability to exchange code was being limited, the same was not true for the distribution of methods and concepts. The distribution of John Lions' commentary on 6th Edition UNIX was stopped as it contained source code. It was followed by Maurice J. Bach's book on System V, which used pseudo-code to explain the system's internals. Many other books followed, including those by McKusick et al, Goodheart & Cox, and Vahalia. All of these outline the methods and concepts in UNIX in exquisite detail.

All of this begs the question, was there ever anything in UNIX worth protecting, and how should it have been protected? UNIX, of course, is one of the most influential and useful operating systems in computing history. But, was it the source code that was critical, or the algorithms used in the system, or its methods and concepts, or something else?

As AT&T began to productize UNIX in the late 1970s, it became critical to protect the source code. However, AT&T dithered on how best to do this. At this time, the ability to copyright software was still uncertain, and the company intially chose a license plus trade secrets approach, and did not revisit the copyright approach until the 1980s. The result of this was the lack of copyright notices in 32V.

But was the actual source code really important? Certainly, it gave the users the ability to tailor their systems, to fix bugs, and to extend UNIX in directions that the original designers had not chosen to go. But the early UNIX source code didn't contain any significantly important algorithms. The preface to the Lions' commentary indicates that the early systems used simple algorithms (linear search etc).

What about the essential "methods and concepts" in UNIX: a hierachical filesystem, i-nodes, multitasking, protected process address spaces, a command-line shell etc.? None of these were new in the realm of operating systems.

In fact, the useful methods and concepts in UNIX were at a much higher level, that of the UNIX toolbox mindset: lots of well-designed tools which perform individual actions, combined with a framework which allows them to be connected together. And the toolbox notions were there (according to McIlroy, Thompson and Kernighan) by 1972. But even at this level, AT&T not only failed to protect this, but encouraged the adoption of this mindset, e.g. with the Software Tools book by Kernighan and Plauger (1976) and the first UNIX issue of the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1978.

In 1983, we had Bourne's book "The UNIX System" (with the copyright held by "Bell Laboratories"!) -- not a good way to protect things. Even after the advent of System V, neither AT&T nor USL attempted to veil methods and concepts. Goodheart and Cox in The Magic Garden Explained (1994) give full details where SVR4 is concerned, calling it "an open systems design."

Finally, in 1995, Mike Gancarz of DEC, gave the world "The UNIX Philosophy", showing us how "the UNIX philosophy is an approach to developing operating systems and software that constantly looks to the future." There is very little there that isn't in the first three articles in the BSTJ in 1978.

In summary, what made UNIX so good, and was it protectable? The jewel in the UNIX crown is not the source code, not the algorithms, not the low-level methods and concepts. It is the basic design of UNIX, its inherent philosophy and mindset, and the ability for users to modify the system and swap changes with other users. While the latter could be limited to some extent via copyrights and licenses, the overall design and the inherent mindset was public from the very beginning, and could never be protected.

To end, an addendum on the ELF magic number issue. There is an amazingly large number of executable formats that use the magic numbers from PDP-11 a.out files: 0407, 0410, 0413. This goes to show that a) a magic number that has no inherent meaning is unprotectable and b) how well the PDP-11 a.out magic numbers infected the binaries of other platforms. Remember, they are all PDP-11 branch instructions. The concept has been with us for over 30 years.


  


UNIX Methods and Concepts: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle, by Salus & Toomey | 242 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
OT Here
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 05:51 PM EDT
Make 'em clickable if you got 'em.


---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections Here
Authored by: feldegast on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 05:51 PM EDT
So they can be found easily

---
IANAL
The above post is (C)Copyright 2006 and released under the Creative Commons
License Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0
P.J. has permission for commercial use

[ Reply to This | # ]

Forcing the users to exhange knowledge with one another?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 06:18 PM EDT
About halfway through, the statement is made that " AT&T's attitude
forced the users to exchange knowledge with one another."

There's not really any explanation there of what attitude of AT&T's forced
this, nor of what form the forcing took, and so I'm kind of lost as to what this
is referring to. Was this just the reluctance to release bug-fixes that's
mentioned some paragraphs later (with respect to the 50-bugs tape) in a
different context, or were there other things going on?

- Brooks

[ Reply to This | # ]

PING Peter&Warren
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 07:00 PM EDT
Are you sure that The SCO Group has recently asserted that IBM negligently
leaked the methods and concepts in UNIX?

Anyway, thanks for this introduction.
I'm looking forward to read all your adventures in the mid nineties.

[ Reply to This | # ]

net.v6bugs archives?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 07:21 PM EDT
Does anybody have archives of the net.v6bugs and net.v7bugs newsgroup? Google
Groups only goes back to 1982 or so.

[ Reply to This | # ]

UNIX Methods and Concepts: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle, by Salus & Toomey
Authored by: devnull13 on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 08:39 PM EDT
What is SOSP?

And does BSTJ expand to "Bell Systems Technical Journal"? Thanks.

JR

[ Reply to This | # ]

The advantage of have the OS source
Authored by: Yossarian on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 08:53 PM EDT
>All the bits, not what we'd call a binary version,
>but the source.

Which was helpful when the Morris worm crippled many UNIX
servers in 1988. Most the backbone connections were down,
because too many servers were down, but phones were used to
spread some quick & dirty fixes. It is not that hard to
coordinate some changes in C code over the phone, but
don't try to do it to binaries, especualy if they run on
different CPUs...

(Now that so much phone communication is carried over IP
I wonder sometimes what will happen if a worm will put
down UNIX/Linux servers *and* the IP phones.)

[ Reply to This | # ]

Well, Duh!
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 10:29 PM EDT
Of it's a scam, we've know that for years.

Scox is just saying anything to keep the case on life support.

Scox would claim they own the state of California, if it would delay the case.
It doesn't matter if nobody believes scox, that's not the point.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Zeitgeist
Authored by: arch_dude on Friday, June 16 2006 @ 11:07 PM EDT
During the 1970s, computers were large and expensive. You could buy mainframes
from IBM or from the BUNCH ( Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, CDC, Honeywell). Or you
could buy a "minicomputer" from that weird upstart DEC. In any case,
if you purchased a computer, you got the source code to the OS as a matter of
course. In 1970, this was in assembler language (except for Burroughs.) each
manufacturer sponsered a user group which had (at least) an annual meeting.
There was no internet. Most sites had at least one systems programmer and these
programmers found and fixed bugs and made local enhancements. There was no
concept that the code was proprietary. Patches were sent back to the
manufacturer and freely communicated among users. The business model was: sell
hardware, software is free. The cost of a computer was approxmately $1,000,000
USD in 1970 dollars.

This is fundamentally different in many ways from the current environment, but
it is the environment in which UNIX was spawned. The systems programmers at
manufacturers and at the customer sites did not even think about the
"intellectual property" associated with the OS software. This was a
non-issue. The manufacturers had ZERO interest in the value of the software,
since the revenue came from hardware sales. the uesr's system programmers cared
about fixing bugs, not about the valuee of the software.

UNIX was developed at the end of this era, but within this zeitgeist. Burroughs
and (reluctantly) Honeywell had built OSes using higher-level languages, but
this was strange and exotic. UNIX was the first OS in a higher-level language
that most programmers were exposed to.

I was a systems programmer during this era: 1970-1972-- IBM customer.
1970-1974--UNIVAC employee. 1974-1976--CDC customer. 1976-1979 Burroughs
customer.


About tapes: a "tape" was a reel of 0.5 inch magnetic tape of length
2400 feet. The physical reel was 12" in diamter and weighed about two
pounds. A blank tape cost about $20 (1970 usd.) or more than half the cost of
the hotel room at the conference.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Openness
Authored by: rsteinmetz70112 on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 01:01 AM EDT
One of the issues we have all confronted from the beginning of this case is that
SCOG has not openly presented their case.

This seems to be based on the relatively thin pretense that there are somehow
secrets in Unix.

The genius of Unix is that is spawned the idea of collaborative development, at
first unconsciously by borrowing from the best practices of the existing
operating systems.

---
Rsteinmetz - IANAL therefore my opinions are illegal.

"I could be wrong now, but I don't think so."
Randy Newman - The Title Theme from Monk

[ Reply to This | # ]

UNIX Methods and Concepts: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle, by Salus & Toomey
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 01:10 AM EDT
PJ,

This is the part where it really shows you know nothing about IP law.

And I mean nothing ... period.

[ Reply to This | # ]

UNIX Methods and Concepts: Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle, by Salus & Toomey
Authored by: Khym Chanur on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 03:06 AM EDT
What The SCO Group fails to realize is that, from day one, the methods and concepts in UNIX were out in the open. My interpreation of what SCO is claiming is that any methods and/or conecepts IBM created and added to UNIX had to be treated the same as any UNIX methods or concepts they got from AT&T/USL/Novell/oldSCO/newSCO. In otherwords, that their contaigon theory of the contract doesn't just apply to code, but to methods and concepts as well. Of course this theory has no merit, but if it is their theory then you're spending time disproving the wrong boneheaded theory.

---
Give a man a match, and he'll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. (Paraphrased from Terry Pratchett)

[ Reply to This | # ]

Sources?!
Authored by: IMANAL on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 03:13 AM EDT
Thanks, that was an interesting read!

A question, where are the sources? There were many little details, like
"tapes found in the street". Are these personal, original
observations? Or did the authors know this first hand?

---
--------------------------
IM Absolutely Not A Lawyer

[ Reply to This | # ]

Leaves a nasty taste in my mouth
Authored by: N. on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 09:52 AM EDT
Should we be condoning the unauthorised leaking of a company's source code by an
employee?

OK, so UNIX code, methods and concepts also escaped by other routes, but no one
should be proud of saying it's OK to use the benefits of that knowledge because
someone else stole that information before them.

---
N.
(Now almost completely Windows-free)

[ Reply to This | # ]

Nice work
Authored by: DaveJakeman on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 09:58 AM EDT
This dissolves SCO's latest mud pellet quite nicely, thank you. And pulls in
some trollfire, so touched the right nerve.

Good work.

---
Shampoo for my real friends, real poo for my sham friends - not Francis Bacon
---
Should one hear an accusation, try it out on the accuser.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Public Domain
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 17 2006 @ 01:17 PM EDT
I'm confused. At what point did UNIX become public domain? Thanks for clearing
this up for me.

[ Reply to This | # ]

UNIX™: The First "Open Source" OS
Authored by: darkonc on Sunday, June 18 2006 @ 12:49 AM EDT
What actually made UNIX™ so powerful was precisely what made Linux so
powerful -- All of it's users had access to the Source Code.
<P>
Although it was, technically, a proprietary OS, just about Every major
University had a site license for the source code, and the few companies that
also had Unix installations had a license as well. Many of the companies that
had Unix also had access to the flegling Usenet or ARPAnet by the very early
80s, so they were able to share patches, and even full source code chunks (if
you mailed the source a copy of the first page of your license).
<P>
In other words, early UNIX had most of the advantages of Open Source -- other
than the license. In fact, by the late '80s the "community" code"
in Unix, (much of that BSD) was such a large proportion if the code, that the
BSD-lite project was able to get off the ground and rewrite (most of) the
remaining bits of UNIX and release an (almost) unencumbered version of UNIX.
<P>((
My thought is that the biggest problem that BSD-inc ran-into is that the guys
that tried to commercialize the "free" Unix openly infringed on the
UNIX Trademark -- which AT&amp;T zealously guarded -- I mean, Come on!
1-800-ITS-UNIX --- That's like burning a US flag in Iraq ... on top of a damaged
Humvee, at the gates to the green zone. The question of the first legal salvo
wasn't if, but <i>when</i>, and the window for the lottery pool was
really really small. )) If they'd used 1-800-real-bsd, instead, they probably
would have been fine. Unfortunately, once AT&amp;T filed suit, they were
pretty much required to also sue them for copyright violation too, and that's
why BSD got frozen in a legal limbo for some years... -- This helped Linux in
two ways:
<br>
1)The legal cloud scared people off of BSD for a while... This gave Linux a
chance to get it's sea legs.<br>
2) It ultimately cleared the IP rights to the BSD code base. This is turning out
to be very useful for SCOvsIBM et al.
<P>
What really killed UNIX in the 80s and early 90s wasn't the fragmentation -- It
was the fact that UNIX was effectively closed-sourced by the attempts of
AT&amp;T to commercialize it. By the late 80's, about the only people who
had source licenses to UNIX were the few universities that insisted on still
running BSD (and, that, mostly on VAXes), and the commercial UNIX providers.
The result was that UNIX was starting to (relatively speaking) stagnate.
<P>
The fragmentation that is cited as the big problem for UNIX was also a result of
the closing of The Source.
Although the UNIX base remained stable, most of the improvements that
were occuring "Out in the wild" were in isolated proprietary islands.
The only real pooled work was in things like Motif, which was (no surprise)
based on the Open-Sourced X-Windows. Other than that, the standards-based UNIX
seems to have consisted primarily of documenting what already existed.
<P>
AT&amp;T didn't realize that by allowing the UNIX source pool to be closed
off, they were killing the golden goose -- Perhaps it was because through the
grab-and-hoard eyes of the standard commercial view of the worls, the goose
looked more like a Penguin.
<P>
In the meantime, Linux was able to go from 0 to 60 in the space of about 8
years, and is still accelerating.


---
Powerful, committed communication. Touching the jewel within each person and
bringing it to life..

[ Reply to This | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )