The open-source software movement-in which programmers freely share and build on each other's work-has successfully churned out everything from operating systems to photo editors. But there's a hitch. Sometimes a program's open-source components turn out to be governed by conflicting licenses. A $3 billion suit filed against IBM in March 2003 by software maker SCO Group-which claims IBM contributed code owned by SCO to the open-source Linux project-is just the most glaring example of the potential dangers.

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