Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 09:24:33 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: Adam <element@Dim.com> Cc: FreeBSD Chat <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Query: How to tell if Microsoft is using BSD TCP/IP code? Message-ID: <20010620092433.F60710@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <200106192117.f5JLHsS11182@supernova.dimensional.com>; from element@Dim.com on Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 03:14:17PM -0700 References: <200106192117.f5JLHsS11182@supernova.dimensional.com>
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[following up to -chat] On Tuesday, 19 June 2001 at 15:14:17 -0700, Adam wrote: > unattributed wrote: >> BSDI or CSRG did the contract work, according to my sources; >> so you might want to ask Kirk or Mike Karels, since you are >> more connected to them than we are (e.g. same building, etc.). >> >> My sources are a former BSDI employee from way back (lawsuit >> days and before), and another person. >> >> The FTP utility contains the copyright string (run "strings" >> on it). Several other standard tools have similar copyright >> strings in them. > > An article over on www.Kuro5hin.org by a someone who claims > to be a former MS employee describes the stack used in NT back > in the early 90's as code which was liscensed from a company > called 'Spider'. This must be Spider in Edinburgh, Scotland. > In the comp.unix.admin archives I found a post which references > Spider QNIX as a *nix variant The Spider I'm thinking of had nothing to do with QNIX. They made custom communications software. At Tandem we used their X.25 stack. I didn't know that they also did TCP/IP stuff, but it's plausible. > so I'm pretty sure this is who the article is referencing. Anyway > this code in turn was pulled from BSD back in the day... It's ambiguous at best. > "...Along with Spider's stack came versions of various > TCP/IP-related utility programs, It's possible to read into this that their stack was primarily non-TCP/IP, which would fit. > such as ftp, rcp and rsh. Those were ported from BSD sockets to > winsock (not a huge change) and bundled with NT." > > I don't know how much faith you can put in it, but its an > interesting read. I found the following snippet to be quite > curious... > > "And implying that the TCP/IP stack uses BSD code is also > false. As I said above there may be small vestiges of it > in there, although I doubt it. There's little to go on here one way or the other. > Anyway the FreeBSD programmers who reported all this to the Wall > Street Journal can't see the NT TCP/IP source either, so they can't > have been referring to that." This sounds like a content-free statement. Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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