I know Cisco infringed on the copyrights to various free software, but I've never heard of open source infringement on the part of the others. Microsoft still has BSD code in Windows, but it complies with the BSD license. Apple has available all of the open source code they're required to give (like GPL) and even some they're not (like BSD). Don't know much about Oracle and open source though.
Can you fill me in?
With respect to Oracle, I commend to your attention the July 24, 2007, edition of Wired Magazine, wherein is to be found a long, interesting article entitled "Inside the High Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend". It's about the Microsoft database wizard, Jim Gray, who disappeared on what was supposed to be a brief boat trip on January 28, 2007. Here are the money grafs:
Gray enrolled at UC Berkeley in 1961, grew his hair long, and rented a basement room with a dirt floor for $5 a month. He thought about majoring in philosophy but lost interest when he discovered computers. He signed up for graduate classes without taking the prerequisites, and in 1969, he earned the university's first PhD in computer science.After a stint at Bell Labs, the scruffy young coder took a job with IBM Research in San Jose. He gamely plunged into the nuts and bolts of data management, considered a dreary backwater even by avid readers of the Systems Journal. Back then, inputting a request to a data bank (the word database hadn't caught on yet) required a thicket of query syntax and a team of programmers. But in 1969, an IBM mathematician named Ted Codd had an epiphany. He sketched out a model for a so-called relational data bank that would make it easier to sift relevant needles from haystacks of information.
Gray joined an R&D team that was attempting to turn these theories into functioning software. His work focused on transactions: When should changes be firmly committed to the database? What if one of a pair of transactions fails halfway through? How can two (or 2,000) users access the same data simultaneously without corrupting it? In his research papers, he compared transactions to a marriage contract: What was the right moment to say "I do"?
Gray's solutions to these riddles are now embedded throughout the networked world, from Amazon.com to the corner ATM. The data bank he created with his colleagues, called System R, laid the technical foundations for a new industry. Updates of its query language, SQL, are still widely used. Compared to their clunky predecessors, relational databases turned out to be better suited to the revolution just over the horizon — GUIs, parallel processing, and the Web.
System R also inspired a seminal open source project at UC Berkeley, a relational database called Ingres, built by a crew led by Mike Stonebraker, now a professor at MIT. Though the teams at IBM and Berkeley were officially competing for the same small market, Stonebraker recalls, "Jim was unbelievably smart and very willing to help without getting credit. Most people considered business data-processing to be beneath them. Who would help Bank of America cash checks? No one foresaw how essential databases would become."
No one but an aspiring entrepreneur named Larry Ellison, then a young programmer working at Ampex on a data-storage scheme for the CIA. The agency's codename for the project: Oracle.
In 1977, Ellison launched a startup called Software Development Laboratories, using System R's papers as the blueprint for his own software. Then he repositioned his database for the emerging minicomputer market, betting that Big Blue would drag its heels. Ellison bet right, and the rest is Silicon Valley history.
"There was no love lost between Jim Gray and Larry Ellison. They hated each other," one of Gray's Microsoft colleagues says. But Gray was gracious in public, and he mellowed with the years. He told an interviewer in 2005 that his life had been a "researcher's dream — you have a lot of fun, you do something innovative, and then people make billions of dollars off of it."