Sounds like two different definitions of the word "proprietary" are involved here: (1) Mechanical changes specific to the company -- this could be as simple as

Sounds like two different definitions of the word "proprietary" are involved here: (1) Mechanical changes specific to the company -- this could be as simple as hardcoded hostnames that match the deployment environment. (2) Implementations of algorithms. In this case it isn't the code that is proprietary so much as the algorithm that the code is an expression of. I suspect that downandout is talking about defintion #1 and the court is talking about definition #2. Hard to say without seeing the code itself.