"In the mid 1990s, when I first began running into open source
in my practice, I noticed that open source had a very strange
effect on intellectual property lawyers. It was a Chicken Little
situation, but instead of crying 'the sky is falling' they were
crying 'the code is infringing.'
"Nearly ten years later, very few intellectual property lawsuits
have actually been filed relating to open source. Roughly, the
scorecard looks like this:
"Trademark infringement suits: 1 (MySQL-NuSphere)
"Copyright infringement suits: 1/2 (SCO, after modifying the
complaint)
"Trade secret infringement suits: 1/2 (SCO, original
complaint)
