Here's the situation. At work here, I hear there is resistance to using open source code (Nant in particular) because there might be copyrighted code in there. Meaning somewhere in that open source tool or library there might be a chunk of code that was directly lifted from copyrighted code. In theory, this means our company (which is quite large) get sued for big money because they used an open source library.

We don't ship any software, so how this theoretical plaintiff would find this out is a mystery.

I have also heard that some group of people came through a year or two ago and actually found instances of this in our codebase. That's hearsay of course, so who knows.

Is this simple paranoia? Didn't something similar to this happen with Linux a while ago? Wouldn't the burden of checking for copyrighted code lie with the people who made the code, not the people who use it?