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On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 06:02:59PM +0000, Matt Lee wrote:
Over the years there have been rumours that M$ used some BSD code, which is not under the GNU licenece. If some of the M$ code is out there a bit of grep ing might be revealing....You don't need the source for this, just run strings on an exe file, like ftp, nslookup, etc. It seems fairly logical that MS would use BSD code, really.. It's going to work better than anything they write, afterall.
Which (IMO) is the major weakness of the BSD licence - the software can be modified and distributed without any acknowledgement or contribution back to the original software. Microsoft may not have improved the BSD code but they almost certainly had to modify it for Windows and then distributed it - something they know the GNU GPL would not permit. Microsoft has little objection to open source for others, it's the GNU GPL that is usually attacked and Linux as a competitor using the GPL. Using grep on binaries or source won't be that useful, there's nothing wrong with anyone using BSD licence code in any proprietary system. It was interesting at Linux Expo (the little bit I heard from the v.v.back), the Microsoft line was to criticise the theory behind the GPL - they would clearly approve if more of GNU/Linux was released under a BSD licence. What gets up their nose is that there are programs released under GPL that they would very much like to steal. (One reason for the SCO fiasco being so important to free software.) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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