microsoft lies — again
Written by jlgaddis on November 19, 2004 – 1:06 pm -It’s definitely not the first time, but Microsoft has lied once again.
In a CNN Article, “Microsoft warns of lawsuits over Linux”, Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying, “We think our software is far more secure than open-source software. It is more secure because we stand behind it, we fixed it, because we built it. Nobody ever knows who built open-source software.”
Let me just remind the avid readers that much of Windows’ initial networking code was actually taken from FreeBSD. That’s fine, however. All of the FreeBSD code is released under the BSD License, which allows (even encourages!) this.
It’s not just that, though. While I’m sure Microsoft has rewritten a lot of the code, I’m also sure that much of it still remains. One highly-known example is in “Microsoft’s” command-line FTP client that comes with its versions of Windows. I just checked again and guess what, it still has BSD code in it:
$ strings ftp.exe | tail -n 2 @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.Am I surprised? Not at all.
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September 18th, 2005 at 9:01 pm
[...] Matter of fact, Microsoft first did this a loooong time ago. Remember http://ftp.exe? On November 19th, 2004, I wrote a post called Microsoft Lies Again, in which I made a note of Microsoft including code from FreeBSD in “their” command-line FTP client. [link] [...]