On Wed, 2003-12-10 at 21:53, Exile In Paradise wrote: > Generically, Rui's question begs the return question, which was better > for users? That M$ had a codebase to start from that was public domain, > or for Windows users to be kept off the net until someone told them > about WinSock? Oh, by then it wasn't an issue. The majority of the computer population did not even think seriously about using Windows ;) And most net-people were running on some kind of Unix. > Having M$ steal BSD's code could be said to have created more problems > for the rest of the world than it solved for the users, but it DID give > the Windows users the ability to get on the Internet... Like I said, by then it wasn't a serious issue. They weren't so "restricted" to Windows as nowadays. > So, for Windows users it was a benefit that the BSD folks had a codebase > out there that M$ could incorporate. Much the same as it was a benefit for slaves when they ate a little more when their master was in a particularly good mood... > The RFC's are public domain right? Not necessarily, and most are not. > Why shouldn't there be a public domain TCP/IP core that implements them? Maybe there is, I don't know (nor do I really care). > If TCP/IP software was GPL, thats fine... M$ would have still had the > standard and probably other stacks to work from too... we would have all > suffered more from their steeper learning curve then, but it would not > have made a lick of difference from the standpoint of slowing them down. I think it would. Look at the time they took killing Netscape :) Had they started from the beginning... I can't even dare thinking about it. Rui -- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...? Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
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