Simple Question

pingu99 · 12-29-2005, 09:30 AM

If Linux is open-source and Windows is closed-source, what prevents Windows developers from simply stealing the code, since nobody could tell if they stole or not, because their source is closed?

Feyd-Rautha · 12-29-2005, 09:32 AM

nothing!

XavierP · 12-29-2005, 09:50 AM

Except the fact that they would be caught at some point. There are too many people watching Microsoft these days for them to be able to get away with it. The second they were suspected, someone would decompile their software to find the offending code.

And I have moved this to General.

cs-cam · 12-29-2005, 06:32 PM

There are too many factors in something like this to make it this basic. If they stole GNU/Linux code then they would be up shits creek big time as it's released under the GPL which has it's own restrictions. If they used BSD code on the other hand, well it's released under the BSD license which has minimal (read: no) restrictions and doing so would be perfectly legal.

This has been discussed to death, so a search. It'll return some interesting reading material at least

pingu99 · 01-06-2006, 04:53 PM

Thank you.