Re: [LUG] The wrong kind of Open Source.

[Simon Waters <Simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

chris wrote:

> Over the years there have been rumours that M$ used some BSD code, which is
> not under the GNU licenece.

Rumours aside they included BSD based utilities with copyright information.

The big question was not a few utilities but whether the IP stack was
BSD based.

Supposedly for W2K (NT5) it was all rewritten from scratch, but a few
"BSDisms" remained leaving some to speculate that perhaps it wasn't that
different from whatever they shipped in NT 3.5, Win95, Win98 etc etc

> If some of the M$ code is out there a bit of grep ing might be revealing....

Unfortunately if it is NT5 code and the IP stack has been rewritten it
won't shed any more light on the BSD IP stack question. Always struck me
as a mute point, as the worst offence they could have committed was
omitting the copyright notice, which no longer applies anyway.

I guess two issues remain;

Is Microsoft code inspection so poor that releasing the source code is a
security risk? The answer seems to be yes if Microsoft is to be
believed. This should scare people, but I guess the average man in the
street doesn't understand why.

Did they use any third party code without permission - it has happened
before, even inadvertently, a modern OS has a lot of code and MS buy in
a lot of code from third parties. So even the presence of GNU GPL'ed
code doesn't mean MS used it wittingly.

Don't see it myself, I don't think the OSes are so similar that
borrowing such code would be that useful.

No the real conspiracy theorists should concern themselves with why the
MS website returns blank documents when I use old versions of Konqueror
on it.

The real worry is people might start submitting bug fixes - then it
really might start to challenge Linux's superiority ;-)

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