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Comment by chaotic_clanger | Hacker News Reader

i must say i find it very interesting and maybe a bit ironic that nt is built on pirated sources (and architecture)

They didn't copy directly, they just re-implemented from memory. I worked for Digital right out of college at the "DEC West" site off 520. A number of my co-workers REALLY hated Microsoft. Swore up & down they had colleges who had seen NT source code when they started working together with Microsoft on "Wolfpack" server clustering that they were using the exact same terms & constants (e.g. structs for system values were identical). Dave Cutler & his crowd were not popular. That $60M - $100M was payoff money to avoid a very public & very nasty copyright suit. And back then, $60M - $100M was considered real money.

Reminder that MS paid off Wang for the stolen OLE technology and that they stole from Stac / Stacker Technology also. They are better behaved now...

they stole from Stac / Stacker Technology

Did they really? I thought MS just implemented their own version of the tech and was accused of violating patents. Did they actually steal IP?

Reading the Wikipedia article, it's not really clear what happened. Looks like MS review Stac code during licensing talks, but there's no mention of accusations of code theft. Then there's discussion of patent violation lawsuits and payoffs going both directions.

If NT was "pirated", then Torvalds must have been Blackbeard himself pirating UNIX

It wasn't. NT was built from scratch.

Written from scratch? Maybe. But they sure as hell didn't get it done without stealing some key "recipe ideas" from VMS.

It was the same architect and some of the same team. Those ideas came from those people originally. Of course there will be similarities!

That's a little disingenuous. The "recipe ideas" were from the same minds that came up with them originally. This comes down to who really owns an idea, the entity that paid for it or the mind that thought it.

So once you've worked on a problem once, your brain belongs to that employer forever?

Nowhere in that (poorly written) article did it say that anything was pirated.

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