""There's a great fear sometimes, that if I use open source, will I lose my intellectual property?" acknowledged Novell's Levy. Other panelists Randy Hergett, director of engineering for the Open Source and Linux Organizations at HP, and Marcus Rex, CTO at the Linux Foundation, sought to assuage those fears.
"The current license for Linux requires you give back any changes you make to the open source community, but there's no way anyone can require those assurances and there's no way we'd know," Rex said."