AT&T vs. CSS (PC/Tools)

[Mark Horton]

In article <36 at gnosys.UUCP> gst at gnosys.UUCP (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:
< Well, the story I heard, and it may have been from Mark Horton, who worked
< on the thing for two or three years after Bill Joy moved on to other projects
< at Berkeley, was that ex/vi *is* covered by the AT&T license EVEN THOUGH IT
< CONTAINS NOT A SINGLE LINE OF CODE FROM ED!!  The fact is that they started
< by hacking on the ed code, and even though they hollowed the thing out and
< dropped in a whole new entity, throwing away everything they had to begin,
< this is just the way the lawyers interpreted the letter of the agreement.

I don't normally read these newsgroups, but this message was brought to
my attention.

The fact is that somewhere around 5% or 10% of the code in vi is really
ed.  The buffer management mechanism, the ex command interface, and the
file I/O stuff, for example, are pretty much unchanged from ed.  For
this reason, vi and ex are covered by the AT&T UNIX license, and cannot
be considered public domain.

	Mark Horton