1)A compnay called SCO claims that code it holds the rights to ended up in the laterst Linux distributions. SCO is suing for royaltie. From what I have seen, they should lose, but intellecutal property laws in this country are pretty screwed up, so I really do not know what will happen.

2)For about two yeas now, Microsoft has been on a kick to get the government to use proprierty as opposed to open source (in a nutshell, properietary means the users cannot look at or modify the code, open source means you cna look at and modify the code. Usually, open source liscences require ytou to give back your changes freely, but not all do. That is the subject of holy wars in the open source community) for government work, claiming that open source code is "un-American" and less secure. Now, large companies like IBM who have invested a lot of money into systems and marketing plans that rely on open source software have formed their own lobbying group to counter Microoft's.

What is really interesting to me is the potential this has on all intellecutal property laws in the country. IP proponents claim that only by having the most draconian and restricive IP laws can compnaies be expected to "innovate", becasue only then can they be guaranteed a return on their investment. Drug compnaies love this argument. However, open source ocde has been extremly successful in a very short amount of time. The software that runs this place was written with an open source language. I haven't chacked, but its almost certain that the web server that its runs on is an open source web server. The internet does not exist without open source code. IBM has made a lot of money wih open source software. Now that there is a lobby group tout9ng the benefits of a business model that does not depend upon restrictive IP laws, it will be interesting to see if anyone in COngress starts to look at the whole IP situation differently. Perhaps the claims of Holywood and drug compnaies will be looked at alittle more carefully.