[OpenIndiana-discuss] Solaris 11 source code leaked?

[Gregory Youngblood]

This seems potentially bad all the way around to me. Hopefully this turns out to be a real, officially blessed release and not a leak.

Given the question as to the origin of this code drop, and the potential huge downside if it turns out to be a leak and not an official code drop, then I would say everyone in Illumos/OI and related communities are best steering clear of the code. Not even steering clear, but deliberately going out of the way to avoid looking at it or anything related to it.

All it takes is someone that even accidentally has unclean hands from seeing the code and then later, perhaps unknowingly, coming up with an idea that is close enough to what was done in the leaked code to potentially doom or cause a major set back to the project(s).

Even avoiding looking at the code is not an assurance that Oracle won't at some point later attempt to apply legal pressure to make things difficult by using the allegation of code from the leak being used without permission. Look how long SCO has managed to drag out it's battle with all things Linux, even after it was found not to own the copyrights. 

Hopefully steering clear of the code will decrease the chances of unfounded legal attacks later. In my opinion, if this is a code leak and not a release, it's a great disservice to everyone involved.

Greg

On Dec 19, 2011, at 10:08 AM, Jonathan Adams wrote:

> it wouldn't need to be a disgruntled Oracle employee, they still deal
> with Intel, and other manufacturers ... just needs to be someone with
> access to the code and no emotional ties to Oracle.
> 
> If code is tagged with the CDDL, can that code not be CDDL? if so a
> third party with no involvement, or an automated system could remove
> files from the archive that don't have the CDDL leaving only
> Open-licensed code available.
> 
> Jon
> 
> On 19 December 2011 16:44, Michael Kerpan <madcrow.maxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm assuming that a disgruntled employee made this dump out of
>> frustration with the current situation. Still, given that the CDDL
>> licenses on most files are almost certainly simply leftovers from the
>> Sun era, the code is useless to OpenIndiana and not legally binding.
>> I'd even go as far as to say that this is a BAD thing as there's now
>> tempting code out there that if it accidentally made its way into OI
>> or FreeBSD or any of the other projects using code from the
>> OpenSolaris era could cause MAJOR legal problems for those projects.
>> 
>> Mike
>> 
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