Microsoft's position isn't anti-open-source, it's against their competitors (esp. GPL)

Posted Aug 16, 2007 9:03 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Microsoft's position isn't anti-open-source, it's against their competitors (esp. GPL) by gdt
Parent article: Two Microsoft licenses submitted for OSI approval

Yeah, this particular mis-information really needs to go away. Someone ought to compile a generic list of IT forum myths so that every time a newbie says "I heard..." or "Isn't it true..." they can get a one day time out and a pointer to the list of myths. Not so much here on LWN but in general technology forums where the same myths come up over and over.

* NO Windows doesn't include a BSD-derived TCP/IP stack and NO they didn't just snip the copyright messages off. NO the BONE TCP/IP stack that was never officially shipped yet somehow seems to be on a lot of BeOS systems isn't BSD-derived either, and NO that wouldn't make it legal to copy it anyway.

* NO the X window system doesn't send everything via TCP/IP networking when you run software locally. NO other systems don't, on the whole, build the GUI into the OS kernel, and NO X wouldn't go "a lot faster" if you ripped the support for network transparency out.

* NO Bill Gates never said that about 640K of memory. NO it's not in "some book" you read unless it's a misquote in that book too. NO it isn't clever to just make up quotes in order to poke fun at someone you don't like.

* NO Linux did not start out as a "server OS" unless suddenly student university digs are server rooms and reading Usenet is a server activity. NO it wasn't "designed for" servers either, except in the sense that your servers happen to be i386 hardware, much like my desktop.

I'm sure there are dozens more, at least...

Anti-Myths: Actually, Windows DOES use some BSD code

Posted Aug 16, 2007 17:20 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216) [Link] (1 responses)

"NO Windows doesn't include a BSD-derived TCP/IP stack and NO they didn't just snip the copyright messages off."

Well, that depends on the definition of "stack". There's BSD-derived code in Windows for implementing TCP/IP. A trivial hunt on Windows XP with "strings" showed that \WINDOWS\System32\nslookup.exe includes "Berkeley" (I'm sure there's more, but I only need one example for the point). And this is OKAY; the Berkeley licenses explicitly PERMIT reuse.

Anti-Myths: Actually, Windows DOES use some BSD code

Posted Aug 29, 2007 19:34 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

The only BSD-derived code is in assorted utilities and examples like this. Most of them are obsolete (nslookup is considered broken by design, FTP is hopelessly insecure, as is telnet) and are included because they're small and Microsoft has learned that removing even the most insignificant feature from their products causes people to accuse them of "downgrading".

Note that I didn't write "network stack" or "operating system stack" which might arguably include such independent programs, but only the TCP/IP stack. Maybe that's nitpicking.

Microsoft's position isn't anti-open-source, it's against their competitors (esp. GPL)

Posted Aug 16, 2007 19:19 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

> NO the BONE TCP/IP stack that was never officially shipped yet somehow seems to be on a lot of BeOS systems isn't BSD-derived either

Cite your source? The BeOS networking stack most certainly WAS derived from BSD. I have the evidence sitting on an old dual 603e BeBox in my garage.

Microsoft's position isn't anti-open-source, it's against their competitors (esp. GPL)

Posted Aug 29, 2007 19:48 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Given that you don't even seem to understand that Be Inc. had two different TCP/IP stacks, I doubt that you have any interesting "evidence".

Howard Berkey, who actually worked on the project, said several times that the BONE stack was not BSD-derived. If he lied then Be's successors in interest stand to be sued for copyright infringement for stripping the BSD copyright notices. The authors would certainly be interested in your evidence, if in fact it exists.

As to the net_server stack, I don't think anyone ever cared how Be Inc developed that, whatever they did was mind-blowingly stupid, its performance is wretched compared even to other userspace TCP/IP offerings.