I can't answer your questions, because like "Bud" Melman and roger, IANAL.

But something you said is exactly the basis for SCO's suit against IBM:

>>> ... certainly it isn’t right to use someone else’s code and distribute it for free if the origional creator didn't want it used that way.

SCO says IBM took its intellectual property (the SMP code from UnixWare) and contributed it to the 2.4 kernal (under GNU terms, making it everybody's to use) w/o SCO's permission. If SCO can demonstrate that (which they haven't yet), it's absolutely wrong and IBM owes SCO big-time.

Don't get me wrong: even buying into the IBM suit's merit, my problem with SCO's approach is the way they're trying to undermine the whole open-source movement with it, and that they say they will ("like the RIAA") go after end-users (not just other commercial Linux vendors, which itself is iffy). That has no grounds at all, since end-users would have no way whatsoever to know they were infringing on anything -- BECAUSE CODE SCO SAYS IS THEIRS IS STILL SECRET!

Ignorance of the law may be no excuse, but the law actually has to be made public or else it obviously is unenforceable.