>From the developers standpoint its a problem.  

I go to work in my field of expertise -- say writing drivers.

I like what I'm doing so I go home where I write more drivers, quite possibly 
for the same family of hardware products because that is where I have 
developed domain expertise.  I'm a better doobie than most software 
developers I've met (particularly contractors) so I have *NO* copy of the 
code I wrote at work that I take home.  I even write little macros and 
utility sub-proceedures twice.  I release the software I write at home to 
under GPL or under some Apache-Berkely-X11 family license.

A)  When I am at work I develop expertise that I use for my hobby.

B) When I am at home I develop expertise that I use at work.

C) The software I sell to my employer and the software that I donated to 
humanity look the same.  An unenlightend employer, or one that is 
particularly greedy, may be upset that I gave away their product.

----

Still, what makes this a red herring is that an awful lot of the critical free 
software products seem to have some sort of corporate sponsorship.  In the 
early days it was clear that advanced students and experienced lone hackers 
made charitable contributions to the free software codebase.  They still do, 
but *critical software*, like the Linux kernel or Apache, seem to have 
dedicated project programmers who are drawing salaries from corporations that 
are making strategic contributions to projects.  

The most important free software products have become mission critical and big 
business.  I wonder how many wildcat hackers actually make meaningful 
contributions.

On Saturday 2003-12-13 14:59, Lee Einer wrote:
> Carl Parrish wrote:
> >Unlike SCO this *actually* could hurt us.
> >http://www.linuxworld.com/story/38208.htm
>
> Key words-
>
> > / It's a hypothetical risk, but it's there."/
>
> The argument as put forth by MicroSoft's counsel is basically that-
>
> If someone who is contributing to an open source project is also
> employed with a company writing proprietary software, and if that
> someone is both bright enough to write code and dumb enough to
> incorporate code which they know full well to be proprietary  into the
> open source project, and if that someone actually does so, and if it is
> found out, there could be a legal conflict.
>
> I don't understand why this would be news- it is basically a summary of
> SCO's case, cast in extremely hypothetical terms. What am I missing?