Subject: BSDI: 1 USL: 0

From: [email-masked] (James da Silva)
Date: 10 Mar 93 15:43:44 GMT

Congratulations to BSDI!

Anyone have any word on whether Berkeley will be able to release 4.4-Lite
now, or will their lawyers still have them wait til the whole thing is
finally over?

I'm one happy naive hippy-freak Unix tech-weenie today!  Hmm, I wonder how
UNIGRAM-X is going to report this? :-)

Jaime
............................................................................
: Stand on my shoulders, : [email-masked]  :                  James da Silva
: not on my toes.        : uunet!mimsy!jds : Systems Design & Analysis Group

------- Forwarded Message

~Date: Tue, 9 Mar 93 19:15:21 MST
~From: [email-masked] (Rob Kolstad)
Message-Id: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
~Subject: BSDI: 1   USL: 0

Greetings from Washington, D.C. and Interop.

Good news today in the legal arena; here's our press release:

----------------------------------------------------------------------

USL Motion Against BSDI Dismissed.

Unix System Laboratories, a majority-owned subsidiary of AT&T, has been
unsuccessful in its attempt to stop the distribution of BSD/386, a
UNIX-compatible software product offered by Berkeley Software Design,
Inc.  BSD/386 is designed to run on IBM-compatible personal computers,
and is based on the Networking Release 2 software developed at the
University of California, at Berkeley.

USL had sought to enjoin the distribution of BSD/386 pending trial,
alleging that both the University and Berkeley Software Design had
infringed copyrights and trade secrets in its 32V UNIX operating
system.  However, in an opinion filed March 3, 1993, in the United
States District Court for the District of New Jersey, District Judge
Dickinson R. Debevoise denied USL's request for a preliminary
injunction to stop the distribution of BSD/386.

His denial was based on a finding that USL was unlikely to succeed in
showing that it had a valid copyright in 32V and that USL had not
successfully shown that either Networking Release 2 or BSD/386
contained any trade secrets belonging to USL.  In making that ruling,
Judge Debevoise noted that the accused header files, file names and
function names were not trade secrets and stated that on the current
record he "was unable to ascertain whether any aspect of Net2 or
BSD/386, be it an individual line of code or the overall system
organization, deserves protection as Plaintiff's trade secret."

Berkeley Software Design thus remains free to distribute BSD/386
without restriction.

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We hope to ship 1.0 shortly.

RK

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