Knowing if someone really stole someone else's code

[perryh at pluto.rain.com]

"Christian Walther" <gmail.com!cptsalek at agora.rdrop.com> wrote:

> Sorry if I sound rude, but did you ever read the BSD license?
> http://www.freebsd.org/copyright/freebsd-license.html
>
> It says in the first sentence:
> "Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
> modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
> met..."
>
> I'd say you can use BSD licensed code for your own projects as long as
> you provide the copyright message ...

Actually, the O.P. raises a legitimate concern.  Yes, the conditions
for use of BSD-licensed code are very liberal; but this is beside
his point.  Suppose Alice *claims* that John used her *proprietary*
code in his product, and John counters that he used someone else's
BSD-licensed code?  How is that sort of claim to be dealt with?

The matter is more than hypothetical:  I seem to recall some legal
wrangling between IBM and SCO over SCO's allegation that IBM wrongly
released SCO-proprietary code under the GPL.