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At least on the IBM side, they were careful about IP rights.

Summer of 1995, I had an internship (as a tester) on IBM's OS/2 LAN Server Enterprise team in Austin. This was well after the IBM/Microsoft 'divorce', but IBM's LAN Server product still had large volumes of code written by Microsoft and still displayed a Microsoft copyright message alongside the IBM copyright.

At that time, one of several other initiatives at IBM was a longer term project to remove all the Microsoft code from LAN Server. To accomplish this, they divided their developers into 'Clean' and 'Dirty' groups, where cleanliness was defined as not having ever seen the Microsoft code. It was then only the 'Clean' developers that could contribute new replacement code.

(The 'Enterprise' project was also interesting in and of itself. To help make the product more scalable, IBM was replacing all of the default directory/etc. services with a new version of DCE they were also developing for OS/2. 22 years later, it all seems pretty archaic, but it was fun at the time to be a bit involved.)




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