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DragonFly kernel List (threaded) for 2003-11
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Re: SCO after BSD settlement


From: Paul Robinson <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 16:57:50 +0000

Gary Thorpe wrote:

So its okay to throw crap at some company because they claim IBM misused it, but Microsoft can violate licenses and its all okay? Wierd world.


Sorry, I just have to butt in for a moment. I thought you were wrong in stating that Microsoft violated the BSD License.

Microsoft do indeed violate the BSD license. I haven't seen a paper manual for Windows in about 7-8 years. So I thought I'd check in the closest thing we have to it these days, in XP, Start Menu -> Help & Support. Go to the search box and type in "copyright" and watch the references to the EULA pop up. In fact type in "BSD" and it talks about how nice we are. At no point, anywhere, even on the Microsoft Licensing website, is there any copy of the BSD License.

I've just done a search of my entire Windows XP hard drive for any files at all that contain the string 'THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES' which is the first bit of the last paragraph of every version I've ever seen of the BSD License.

Something smells here - we know for a fact that at least the IPv6 in there now and even the TCP/IP stacks in Windows since NT4 were a direct lift from BSD world... it even confused nmap for a while... so, what gives?

They do actively encourage it's use though:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Articles/LicensingOverview.mspx

And of course, Paul Richards has that story about meeting the Microsoft guys working on .NET at BSDcon Europe in 2001 - their development platform of choice apparently was FreeBSD. So, it's not like they don't know who we are or anything...

--
Paul Robinson





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