Windows source leaked?

[Major Variola (ret)]

At 05:34 PM 2/13/04 -0500, Steve Furlong wrote:
>
>In principle they can prove that the secret didn't have any influence
on
>the work, but in practice they're stuck having to prove a negative.

I was hoping the courts would see the impossibility of proving a
negative,
and see true dissimilarities in the code as indicitive of fair play.

> If push came to shove, the
>implementors could have sworn that they had never seen the IBM code.

But other than their "sworn word", how would anyone know what they did,
except that their source differed from the original?

I hope the precedent of the IBM case and the widespread ability to
publish
anything instantly nowadays sways an intelligent court without
programmers getting harmed.

Its rather asymmetric --open source is out there, proprietary isn't.  I
wonder
if frags of OSS code can be found in proprietary binaries.