Yes, it was clean-room, along the lines of "I need a program to extract strings from binary files." I don't think I even looked at a man page for an existing implementation, so the options and functionality are almost certainly different from other implementations of strings.
This was driven by Microsoft's hostile policies towards running anything open source inside the company (you have to get special dispensation to install Linux, for instance). Actually looking at outside source code is a big no-no.
There has been at least one case of a contractor including GPL3 code in a project, and MS responded by (a) letting the contractor go, and (b) releasing the source for the product in question. [And no, it wasn't Windows]
This was driven by Microsoft's hostile policies towards running anything open source inside the company (you have to get special dispensation to install Linux, for instance). Actually looking at outside source code is a big no-no.
There has been at least one case of a contractor including GPL3 code in a project, and MS responded by (a) letting the contractor go, and (b) releasing the source for the product in question. [And no, it wasn't Windows]