Re: [tlug] [OT] Say _no_ to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Wed, 4 Jul 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> david.blomberg@example.com writes:
>
> > The same redmond company has been fairly famous in the past for taking
> > BSD licensed code and including it in its own OS.  I never saw any
> > updates from them in BSD though.
>
> I haven't heard any complaints from BSD developers about that, except
> that they really wish nobody knew about it because MSFT's derived code
> is so famously buggy. ;-)

Hey, it's probably less buggy than what they would have produced had
they done it from scratch themselves. And besides, a lot of their bugs
are compatible with ours. :-)

I think that MS (and many other companies) "stealing" the BSD TCP/IP
stack may be one of the greatest successes that open source has ever
had. Luring everyone on to a common, open networking standard, and
spiking a couple of proprietary networking protocols in the process,
probably did more than anything else to make the Internet what it is
today.

It's interesting to think that had that stack been GPL'd, Stallman might
still be distributing gcc via magtapes through the mail today.

cjs (a NetBSD developer)
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
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