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

Posted Aug 16, 2007 17:20 UTC (Thu) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)
In reply to: Microsoft's position isn't anti-open-source, it's against their competitors (esp. GPL) by tialaramex
Parent article: Two Microsoft licenses submitted for OSI approval

"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.