[lukeh]

The example in the article is an exception but, companies (including Sun) are generally very careful about using open source, and using it without attribution would be the exception not the rule.

Large companies are slow, indeed. In the late 90s I wrote a few operating system plugins (nss_ldap, pam_ldap, GSS SASL plugin for the Netscape directory server) which were eventually obsoleted by native Solaris equivalents. The Sun versions were on the whole better engineered, if less flexible, because their OS team had a depth of experience that I didn't have at the time.