Actually, most open software licenses, including the GPL, allows you to take someones code, remove the copyright, and incorporate it in your own project.

I'll ignore the subtle legalities (since I'm not a lawyer), but for everyone's sanity, I'd recommend *not* just blindly stripping the license off of code you want to use, even if it will only be used internally. 'Cause it'll only lead to heartache later when a few years down the line someone else wants to distribute that code. He'll assume that the organization owns the code ("Hey, there's no copyright notices! We must have wrote it.") and he won't see that he's got obligations he has to live up to. For a good example of this, see the SCO vs. Linux thing where SCO stripped the BSD license off of some code and later forgot where it came from.