Talk:Hosts

Is the "Microsoft used FreeBSD's TCP/IP code" an urban legend? There are plenty of quotes to this effect on the internet but no official references to research evidence or proof. I'm happy to reword it if is untrue. Does anyone here know?

not an urban legend, though they got it third-hand

http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

There have historically been quite a few places in Microsoft's OS'es that had the telltale "University of Regents" banner stamped in where you couldn't see them, but typically they came third-hand by way of MS licensing somebody else's code that was derived from BSD. Completely informally, my guess is that it ends up third-hand because if MS had developed it in-house, they'd have first studied the BSD code and then rewritten it (in order to avoid needing to include the telltale banner) rather than directly including it. Code they license from a third party might not end up under quite the same scrutiny, though.

One way or another, nearly every OS on the planet used mostly BSD code to implement TCP/IP at first. It's been pretty heavily speculated that the universal availability of the BSD TCP/IP stack is what made TCP/IP end up being the dominant network protocol across all platforms. --Jimbo 14:51, 18 October 2007 (EDT)

Ask and ye shall find...

You are indeed an oracle and font of all knowledge! I shall leave the reference as written. Quite an interesting view of TCP/IP's rise to de facto standard, I can see how that figures. Thanks Jimbo. Doctor Modiford 15:55, 18 October 2007 (EDT)