RTFH (read the friendly Help screen)

RTFH (read the friendly Help screen)

Posted Dec 5, 2002 17:54 UTC (Thu) by Medievalist (guest, #8395)
In reply to: No future in proprietary software (ZDNet) by mnummeli
Parent article: No future in proprietary software (ZDNet)

In Internet Explorer, select the "Help" menu from the top menu bar, then select "About", then look at all the pretty licensing information.

For even more, move the binary to a more capable OS such as ancient, doddering Unix or fresh, half-baked linux :^) and do a "strings" command on it.

Windows itself contains code from IBM, Shiva, Symantec, and many others... as well as some BSD code and implementations of reverse-engineered algorithms derived from Apple and Stac products.

Microsoft pays other companies to provide things like antivirii, disk defragmentation, remote access services, etc. that they are unable to create themselves (within their artifical time constraints for release, that is). Some of these things (like the disk defragger) could easily be "unbundled", others (like Shiva's RAS) have become pretty deeply entangled in the windows code-base.

--Charlie

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