Re: SCO after BSD settlement

[Paul Robinson <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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