Quote Originally Posted by cousinlucky View Post
Let's say the the engineers and lawyers at Microsoft discover that Skippy's product here and there looks a little similar to one of Microsofts os and they take Skippy to court. If Skippy did not have any access to Microsoft's code and developed his system entirely on his own can the courts force him to throw it away??
Yes. And no. It depends.

Yes, because of these wonderful software patents, which can apply to look&feel (e.g. progress bar) as much as to algorithms. However, "no" too. MS hasn't pulled that card too often until now, as this can easily backfire because they are not the only company holding patents (as can be seen above). Free Software lawyer Eben Moglen once compared that to the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy of the cold war era.

And there are Free Software projects like ReactOS, which have been left alone by MS mostly.