Here is a funny experiment – try this at home if you have a dual boot. Under linux mount your windows partition and go to WINDOWS/SYSTEM32. Now run strings on ftp.exe and grep for “Copyright”
strings ftp.exe | grep Copyright –
Supprised? How ironic is it that the windows developers didn’t even bother to strip the copyright notice from the code they were ripping off? Would you leave this comment line if you would be ripping off someone’s code?
Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
This is BSD code btw – and it is perfectly legal, as BSD license allows copying without any restrictions. This is why MS generally likes “open source” they can rip off, but abhores GPL. Because they can’t use linux community as their free research and development lab they are out to crush it.
On a compleately unrelated note, how cool is the Space Elevator Project? They say it might be ready within next 15-20 years… Which means I will be still alive to see it! Yay!
Does not surprise me in the least.
At least be thorough and have pride in your work.
According to the BSD license (which Microsoft agreed to when using the code):
* Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1990, 1991, 1993
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
*
* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
* are met:
* 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
That means Microsoft was required to leave the copyright intact. Sure, I get the point about them being against the GPL but loving BSD, but they didn’t just blatantly leave the copyright statement in because they’re inept code stealers. They were just obeying the license restrictions which is perfectly reasonable.
@ YoureMissingSomething:
Nope. “Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright”
Not only is it NOT a source redistribution, but the copyright notice is still in tact. This means Microsoft is actually going above and beyond the BSD license.