According to Berkeley Software Design International Ltd’s Peter Collinson, based at the company’s Canterbury, Kent subsidiary in the UK, Berkeley Software is relying on the Berkeley statement that there is no AT&T code within BSD Networking Release 2, the basis of its BSD/386 product, and as such it feels it is on solid ground (CI No 1,957). But a Unix System Laboratories Inc spokesman said that in order to develop a source code-free imp-lementation of Unix you would have to find people with no inti-mate knowledge of the source code. If people develop a kernel independently, that’s fine. Unix Labs, he said, is increasingly concentrating on applications binary interfaces and specifications, but would protect its proprietary rights in all cases. Arguments over intellectual property rights and re-writing code have been doing the rounds of the court system for years. But what really seems to be worrying Unix Labs is the commercial use of the code by third parties such as Berkeley Systems, which, says Unix Labs, may go beyond the channels approved in AT&T Co contracts with all universities that Unix source code can be used for internal administration and educational purposes – not commercial use. What’s changed, says Berkeley Computer Science Research Group’s Keith Bostic, is that We want our software to be widely available to anyone that wants it – a lot of people pick and choose the bits they want. Unix vendors, he said have always shipped BSD code – Sun, DEC and the Open Software Foundation have all used Berkeley work. But these companies have always taken out a separate source licence with Unix System Labs, something that Berkeley Software does not appear to have done. Unix Labs is worried that if it doesn’t act now, the practice may become more widespread. It remains to be seen what effect the moves will have on the Open Software Foundation’ plans for AT&T-free versions of its Microkernel-based OSF/2 operating system with its mixture of Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University code.
