Legal/Permission Question

[Walter Bright]

BCS wrote:
> Reply to Walter,
>> What will happen if things go far enough is an independent expert will
>> be hired by the lawyers who will comb through the code evaluating how
>> similar or dissimilar it is.
> And when that happens, the independent expert makes money, the lawyer 
> makes money and everybody else pays them.

In cases I know about, a settlement offer usually appears before things 
go too far, because it gets pretty obvious if there was any hanky-panky.

I got a settlement once after running "strings" over the other company's 
binaries, and 90% of their string literals matched word-for-word the 
ones in mine, despite their claim they wrote it "from scratch". Oops. 
I'd have liked to have heard the conversation between the opposing 
lawyer and the engineers he represented after that one.