WinNT and BSD..............hmmmmmm

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Don't I remember hearing that a bunch of BSD guys were the ones who worked on NT? (maybe it was OS/2 i dont remember)

anyways i keep finding little hints of similarities.....like in boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=0
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" /fastdetect /KERNEL=NTOSCHK.EXE

come on that is totally remeniscient of UNIX, also if you look in c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc it is quite similar, imagine...windows files that don't have an extension! i know there are others, but most are .ini's, .sys' and so forth. also note the directory name "etc", where have we seen that before?

you think NT (and thus 2k and XP) have big portions of BSD code in them??? i mean, you would never know, and it's totally possible.

 

[Buddha Bart]

actually its a known fact... NT has BSD code in it. Its actually in microsofts docuemtation somewhere.

bart

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

well i know there is some, networking stuff which is pretty much in every OS but just how much bsd code is in NT?

 

[n0cmonkey]

Ask Ameesh, he will say NONE. But that is a bold faced lie. NT is a bad hack of a wanna be microkernel. What OSes are out there that have a Microkernel? Mach, which is BSD based, and Hurd, which isnt a standalone OS really yet. Anyhow, they have taken a bunch, run strings on some NT programs and you will find it. No biggie. Thats what the BSD license is there for 😀

 

[nuttervm]

NT was written primarily by software engineers from Digital Equipment corp who had been responsible for the creation of the VAX/VMS operating system. that is why certain parts of it have a unix-like feel.

and n0cmonkey is right... the bsd license allows integration of the code into closed source commercial software products. the only thing that the bad boys at MS failed to do was give proper credit where it is due, which is part of the bsd license. (so yes they're allowed to reuse the code as long as they admit that they used the code from bsd, which is where the situation gets controversial).