''USL v. BSDi'' was a

lawsuit - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil acti ...

brought in the United States in 1992 by

Unix System Laboratories Unix System Laboratories (USL), sometimes written UNIX System Laboratories to follow relevant trademark guidelines of the time, was an American software laboratory and product development company that existed from 1989 through 1993. At first wh ...

against Berkeley Software Design, Inc and the

Regents of the University of California The Regents of the University of California (also referred to as the Board of Regents to distinguish the board from the corporation it governs of the same name) is the governing board of the University of California (UC), a state university sy ...

over

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, c ...

related to the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

operating system; a culmination of the

Unix wars The Unix wars were struggles between vendors to set a standard for the Unix operating system in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Origins Although AT&T Corporation created Unix, by the 1980s, the University of California, Berkeley Computer System ...

. The case was settled out of court in 1994 after the judge expressed doubt in the validity of USL's intellectual property, with

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the le ...

(who by that time had bought USL) and the University agreeing not to litigate further over the

Berkeley Software Distribution The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

(BSD).

Background

The suit has its roots at the

Computer Systems Research Group The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. History Professor B ...

(CSRG) at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, which had a

license A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...

for the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

of UNIX from

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

. Students doing

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also ...

s research at the CSRG modified and extended UNIX, and the CSRG made several releases of the modified operating system beginning in 1978, with AT&T's blessing. Because this Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) contained copyrighted AT&T Unix

, it was only available to organizations with a source code license for Unix from AT&T. Students and faculty at the CSRG audited the software code for the

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

stack, removing all the AT&T intellectual property, and released it to the general public in 1988 as " Net/1", under the

BSD license BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lic ...

. When it became apparent that the Berkeley CSRG would soon close, students and faculty at the CSRG began an effort to remove all the remaining AT&T code from the BSD and replace it with their own. This effort resulted in the public release of Net/2 in 1991, again under the BSD license. Net/2 contained enough code for a nearly complete UNIX-like system, which the CSRG believed contained no AT&T intellectual property. Berkeley Software Design (BSDi) obtained the source for Net/2, filled in the missing pieces, and

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

it to the Intel

i386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistorsBSD/386 operating system, which could be ordered through 1-800-ITS-UNIX. This drew the ire of AT&T, which did not agree with BSDi's claim that BSD/386 was free of AT&T intellectual property. AT&T's

subsidiary filed suit against BSDi in New Jersey in April 1992, a suit that was later amended to include The Regents of the University of California.

USL's complaint

In the lawsuit, USL alleged that: * The Regents of the University of California, by releasing Net/2 "based upon, substantially copied from, or derived from proprietary UNIX", had ** breached USL's software license contract; ** infringed on USL's copyright on UNIX; ** diluted USL's trademark on UNIX; ** misappropriated USL's trade secret on UNIX. On these grounds, USL asked the court for a preliminary

injunction An injunction is a legal and equitable remedy in the form of a special court order that compels a party to do or refrain from specific acts. ("The court of appeals ... has exclusive jurisdiction to enjoin, set aside, suspend (in whole or in ...

that would bar BSDi from distributing the Net/2 software until the case was decided.

Pretrial

At a hearing, BSDi contended that they were using the sources freely distributed by the University of California plus six additional files. BSDi accepted liability for their own six files, but refused to account for the other files distributed by the University of California. The judge agreed with BSDI's argument and told USL to restate their complaint based solely on the six files or he would dismiss it. Rather than narrow down their claim, USL chose to sue BSDi and the University of California, and requested a preliminary injunction on the distribution of Net/2 from both.Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable
, by

Marshall Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to ...

In 1993, judge Dickinson R. Debevoise denied a preliminary injunction, on the grounds that USL had no valid copyright over 32V and could not show any obvious trade secret. Works published in the U.S. between January 1, 1978 and March 1, 1989, were subject to the provisions of 17 U.S.C. § 405(a), which required the copyright owner to properly affix a copyright notice to the work in order to claim copyright protection. AT&T released V32 in 1978, but omitted a notice from thousands of copies and failed to copyright 32V until 1992.

University's countersuit

In 1993, a few days after the dismissal of the preliminary injunction, the University filed a countersuit against USL in California, claiming that USL had failed to credit the University for the use of BSD code in System V, as required by the software license contract. The University demanded that USL be forced to reprint all their documentation with the appropriate due credit added, to notify all their licensees of their oversight, and to run full-page advertisements in major publications such as ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' and ''

Fortune Magazine ''Fortune'' is an American multinational business magazine headquartered in New York City. It is published by Fortune Media Group Holdings, owned by Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon. The publication was founded by Henry Luce in 1929. The ...

'' informing the public of their omission.

Settlement

In July 1993, soon after UC filed its countersuit, USL was purchased by

. Novell CEO

Ray Noorda Raymond John "Ray" Noorda (19 June 1924 – 9 October 2006) was a U.S. computer businessman. He was CEO of Novell between 1982 and 1994. He also served as chairman of Novell until he was replaced in 1994. Early life Noorda was born in Og ...

favored a settlement that was reached in February 1994. The salient points were:USL v. BSDi settlement agreement
(Adobe .pdf format)
HTML version
* 4.4BSD-lite to be released containing no disputed files. University to encourage licensees to switch from Net/2. * University to cease distribution of certain files. * USL to grant three months' grace period to users of disputed files. * Certain files distributed by University to carry USL copyright notice. * Certain files distributed by USL to carry University copyright notices. * USL to permit free distribution of certain files. * University not to actively assist in legal attempts to challenge USL's rights to certain files. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the upcoming 4.4BSD-Lite release.

References

{{Reflist Berkeley Software Distribution Lawsuits University of California, Berkeley Unix history AT&T litigation University of California litigation SCO–Linux disputes