The Open-Source Detector

Posted by timothy on Wednesday May 4, 2005 @12:25AM from the lie-detection dept.

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.

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The BSD license argument by marcovje · 2005-05-04 00:41 · Score: 5, Interesting

>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.

This example (socket code) often pops up, and is often used in GPL advocacy.

Note however that the TCP/IP work was done under a DARPA grant, paid for by the US government, so it is not only legal, but even moral right for Microsoft to use this code.