Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Tue 10th Jun 2003 01:06 UTC
On March 7th 2003, the SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM for misappropriation of tradesecrets and contractual agreements. The scope of SCOs complaint is that IBM introduced parts of Unix System V and Project Monterey into the Linux kernel. Project Monterey was a effort to port IBM's AIX 5L onto the Intel Itanium platform, IBM withdrew from that project for reasons unknown according to the press, I believe that it was because the Itanium is a bomb. 
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"It is an impossible task for the linux or bsd kernel maintainers to check the origin of the code that is submitted to them, after all, Solaris, Windows or AIX source code isn't available to the public."
I always marvelled at that concept as well. Ok, you can have your copyright (patent, or whatever), but how can it mean anything if we don't even know what the code is? It's not like a book that's clearly written, and you CAN'T COPY IT. Software is different. You can't read it, so you can't tell where it comes from. MS, SUN, IBM and every company runs into the same problem. What if any employee put some GPL code into their software? What if they put another companies IP code in there? Who would ever know? The nature of Open Source requires honesty. That doesn't mean IP companies are dishonest, just that they COULD be, while open source CANNOT be. Interesting how general concept of copyrights should be consistent with all other written forms of writing EXCEPT software. That's just the philosopher in me - always questions, no answers.