Actually the netcat shipped on most/all common Linux distributions (though IIRC, frustratingly not Cygwin which has a more limited one without the SOCKS features) is the one from OpenBSD.
But obviously the article was written from the perspective of "Fun commands available on Linux". I'm all for giving proper credit where it is due, but it's asking a little too much to expect that every newbie tutorial is going to inflict a full software genealogy on the poor reader...
