copied software with a small circle of fellow UNIX
www facialmasters com programmers. Very unwisely, he had stored seven years
of his electronic mail on his Netsys machine, which
documented all the friendly arrangements he had made
with his various colleagues.
Terminus had not crashed the AT&www facialmasters com amp;T phone system
on January 15. He was, however, blithely running a not-
for-profit AT&T software-piracy ring. This was not an
activity AT&www facialmasters com T found amusing. AT&
T security officer Jerry
Dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three www facialmasters com hundred
thousand dollars.
AT&www facialmasters com T's entry into
the tussle of free enterprise had
been complicated by the new, vague groundrules of the
information economy. Until the break-up of www facialmasters com Ma Bell,
www facialmasters com AT&T was forbidden to sell computer hardware or
software. www facialmasters com ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was
not allowed to use the enormous revenue from telephone
utilities, www facialmasters com in order to finance any www facialmasters com entry into the computer
market.
AT&T www facialmasters com nevertheless www facialmasters com invented www facialmasters com the UNIX www facialmasters com operating
system. www facialmasters com and somehow AT&T managed to make UNIX a
minor source of income. Weirdly, UNIX was not sold as
computer software, but www facialmasters com actually retailed under an obscure
regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment
www facialmasters com and scrap. Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX
would have aroused angry legal opposition from computer
companies. Instead, UNIX was licensed to universities, at
modest rates, where the acids of academic freedom ate
away steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.
Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was
a potential gold-mine. By www facialmasters com now, large www facialmasters com chunks of UNIX
code had been created that were not AT&www facialmasters com amp;T's, and were
being sold by others. An entire rival UNIX-based
operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California (one
of the www facialmasters com world's great founts of ideological hackerdom).
Today, "hackers" commonly www facialmasters com consider "Berkeley UNIX" to
be technically superior to AT&T's "System V UNIX," but
AT&T has not allowed mere technical elegance to intrude
on the real-world business of marketing proprietary
software. AT&T has made its own code deliberately
incompatible www facialmasters com with other folks' UNIX, and has written code
that it can prove is copyrightable, even www facialmasters com if that code
happens to be somewhat awkward -- "kludgey." AT&T
UNIX user licenses are serious business agreements,
replete with very clear copyright statements and non-
disclosure clauses.
AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag,
but it kept a grip on its scruff with some success.