It's still not lifting if was given to them for free, your uneducated guesses and incorrect assertions are best kept to yourself.
Oh, Gosh, so it's OK for MS to accept code for free, but not anyone else?
For the record, I already said I have no problem with MS accepting BSD-licensed code, but you are the one making an issue of Linux being free.
It doesn't matter where they got it from. Spider successfully ported the stack into another usable form (which they could do under the BSD license--so long as the original creator got due credit). MS "licensed" the code and stuck it in their OS,
Oh, and Spider's TCP/IP stack wasn't even designed to work in NT--MS had to do some serious porting of both Spider's stack and the STREAMS wrapper to get it to work with NT.
Did they lift it directly from BSD? Hard to say, but considering some of the utilities have basically remained unchanged, I'm inclined to say yes.
Did they at least indirectly lift the stack? Unequivocally (and undeniably), yes. Legal, but highly unethical.
Which, btw, is originally a spinoff of OS/2 and elements copied from Digital VMS (for which Digital promptly sued and got an out-of-court settlement for).
fd--add this one to The List...