[ILUG] Re: ILUG sends s/w patents briefing document to Irish MEPs

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Niall O Broin (niall at linux.ie):

> Although the original standards were owned (I think DoD money 
> paid for them) they were free for all to use, and so they were very 
> similar in their availability to open source software today, and that 
> freedom was important to their wide adoption.

I believe the first TCP/IP implementation was developed under DoD ARPA
grant by BBN.  ARPA subsequently (1985) tried to pressure UC Berkeley's
CSRG (Computer Science Research Group -- the BSD people) into adopting
BBN's code, which CSRG found ridiculously unstable, into 4.3BSD, so they
wrote their own much, much better replacement.

Since the design wasn't patented ("owned"), it was inherently free to
reimplement as people wished.

> The only comparable protocol (and in many ways of course it's NOT 
> comparable, but it was also very widely used) that springs to mind was 
> IPX but it was an owned protocol, and was used only by one company, or 
> to interwork with that company's products. I imagine there are many 
> readers of this list don't even know what IPX is.

Good ol' Internet Packet Exchange and Sequenced Packet Exchange.

Aren't they fully defined in RFCs 1132, 1234, 1553, 1634, and others?
I could swear that the entire traditional NCP stack had been publicly
documented, by now.