OSNews

Copyleft software has been amazingly successful in the courtroom, even when the facts of the case are To Kill A Mockingbird-obvious. ReactOS probably doesn't have anything to worry about.

SCO's claim to date has amounted to 349 lines of code they claim was copied, with the majority of them consisting of comments and declarations; it's questionable whether those portions would even be covered by copyright law even if IBM admitted to copy-and-paste tactics.

Copyleft is successful specifically because of many of the practices behind it, such as clean-room reverse engineering or the absence of direct contact with copyright protected code. This can't be overlooked.

It would be a mistake for a paid proprietary developer to contribute work to a similar OSS project, or even if that developer has access to proprietary code and information as part of their daily job. Most high profile projects will tend to reject work under those circumstances, and even IBM and HP compartmentalize their OSS and proprietary software developers.

Remember that you can't copy something you don't have access to. With a project like ReactOS where the software is written from scratch or based on existing OSS code, it would be difficult for Microsoft to claim code was copied from or directly influenced by their own source code since they would have difficulty proving the developers ever saw Microsoft source code, which reduces their opposition tactics to the usual claims of baseless IP copying. That premise works because none of the developers actually has contact with Microsoft source code; if one of them does then the entire argument shifts potentially in Microsoft's favor.