The Open-Source Detector

McDutchie writes "With open-source related lawsuits on the rise, a market is developing for automated tools that detect the presence of open-source code within larger application development environments. Palamida Inc. stepped in with IP Amplifier 3.0, essentially a search tool and a database that consists of more than 38 million of the most commonly used open-source files. Something Google-inspired called CodeRank is claimed to match code against the database. Hmm... maybe someone should run it on this, or even this." Of course, some open source code is perfectly welcome in commercial software, even if that software's code is not itself open; it's no secret or surprise that Microsoft, for instance, has taken advantage in some products of BSD-licensed code.

Comments

If Microsoft just had taken all it's code from BSD

[ooze]

Having inherited, and now to clean up and later to maintain a fairly big chunk (unbelievably huge, cumbersome and bloated actually, when considering what it should do) of Microsoft code at my job, I don't wonder anymore about anything concerning Microsoft products, except them reliably working. Found no OpenSource code in there though. Only loads of Microsoft technology where it isn't needed, and retarded code constructs where there is actually an appropriate standard way in the MS environment.

In private I'm all MS less for months already (after another Windows breakdown I decided it was time to part). Still have to deal at work with it though.

Ok, so here we have the standard /. MS rant.

Call for action

[shai_m]

To whomever has access to the Windows source (via their "shared source" channel or any other _legitimate_ way): please check their source.