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A Day Without Open Source

2007.06.26

I saw the following article posted on one of our professor's door. It's a great article but it only scratches the surface of how pervasive Open Source software is. While it mentions DNS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenSSH, Apache, and Firefox, it misses a few other biggies: The Windows network stack and utilities such as FTP and telnet, the underlying OS in Apple's Mac OSX, NFS (which went on to inspire MS' smb/cifs) sendmail, and countless more.

That's right, the TCP/IP stack in Windows NT/2000/XP was based heavily on BSD's outstanding implementation. Microsoft apparently "rewrote" TCP/IP for Vista, but I'm certain that much of the old layer remains. In fact, even Hotmail, which Microsoft acquired in 1997, ran on FreeBSD servers until well into 2001/2002, several years after Windows 2000 Server was available commercially.