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Date:      Tue, 19 Jun 2001 15:14:17 -0700 (Mountain Standard Time)
From:      Adam <element@Dim.com>
To:        hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Query:  How to tell if Microsoft is using BSD TCP/IP code?
Message-ID:  <200106192117.f5JLHsS11182@supernova.dimensional.com>

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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'. In the comp.unix.admin archives I found a post
which references Spider QNIX as a *nix variant 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...

"...Along with Spider's stack came versions of various 
TCP/IP-related utility programs, 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. 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."

Sorry if this belongs in -chat now. Just passing it along.

>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.



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