snip
Hi Arne,
I have the same opinion and agree with you. :-) To support it, I added some comments ...
I've never taken the people seriously who claim that OSS is full of stolen code, simply because
a) Closed source is typically quite hard to get.
b) Source from other projects is often quite a hassle to integrate. "Just write it yourself" will not
only save you legal trouble, but also work.
Indeed, from my experience ... a team worked on a CSS project for half a year, finished it (and forgot). After one year some new functionality had to be built in. The same team started to work on it, but after three months recognized it's a blind way. They started from scratch, changed programming language and platform (to Linux of course :-) ), and after 6 month happily finished.
The only exception is, if some strict OOP language (i.e. not C++) is used and all project/classes very well designed. But in this case the "old" code is "visibly" encapsulated/separated so everybody can recognize "stolen" code immediately.
c) It's damn silly to do this because chances are that you *will* get caught.
Yes, if of course publicity is not what u love ;-).
d) If there was such a lot of stolen code in OSS, well, CSS companies can verify this simply by
downloading the source and comparing it against their own repositories. We would see a lot
more SCO-like cases (and we would actually see SCO win their lawsuits ;-) ).
Yes, usually OSS programmers work, because they like to. They are mostly fanatics and are very proud of their fruits of pleasure. I know a lot of them ... a friend of me is earning money on bookkeeping written on his own database engine (and language of course) ! For such guy to write "clean" own code is not only a question of honor, but let say "religion".
OTOH, I've seen rather lax handling of GPL'ed software in CSS projects myself. I suspect
stealing GPL'ed code for inclusion into proprietary software (that is actually distributed) is *very*
common, and counts as something of a peccadillo ("well, they're not getting money for it
anyway...").
Of course, if some guy is an employee, he is under the force, stress, schedules and will etc. of his employer ... he works for money and only if has a luck also for pleasure. :-(
Once I had to setup commercial web server (Netscape iPlanet) on Solaris to work as (FQDN based) virtual web server. All the documentation was only about GUI config tool, but no note about the possibility to setup virtual server anywhere. Just for fun I opened config files and learned, my knowledge about apache config is very useful here ... I set it up using "undocumented" (i.e. apache) directives and the job was easily done. Server worked properly, but GUI config tool was totally upset :-). I think no more comments are not necessary ...
noro
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