[OpenIndiana-discuss] What is OI/illumos stance on recreation of features from Solaris 11 (and other proprietary OSes)?

[Jim Klimov]

2012-10-10 21:03, James Carlson wrote:
> In any event, I still think it's somewhere between unhelpful and
> downright dangerous to bother with it as part of OpenIndiana.  I've
> probably crossed the line from "trying to shut it down" to being part of
> the problem, so I'm going to try to shut up now ...


Okay, sorry for the fuss - I did not think this would be such
a sensitive and difficult question, and one actually forbidden
to discuss in the open so as to not make matters worse. All the
responses were educating at least - so thanks to everyone.
If there are more comments anyone would like to make, I'd think
that we should better conspire about them in private e-mails.

Alas, like many discussions about legalities (even those with
lawyers and accountants and such), there are no concrete good
answers like "do this" or "don't do that" (except the fighting
club rule #1 - don't talk about it).

The remaining answer (with a grain of sarcasm) I guess remains
that if one ever decides to contribute a feature to any kind
of open-source project (or indeed to a commercial product, but
that would be a hiring entrepreneur's problem), the programmer
should hire a lawyer and a patent examiner to make sure that
no-one in the world has ever done anything similar. After a
few years and rivers of dollars have flown by, one can start
coding with whatever remnants of enthusiasm remain.

Alternately, one can just go and hack away and never bother -
and especially never tell - about his or her motives for
adding a particular feature to publicly available code that
anyone ready to take some risk would use or resell.

And, it seems, such a risk is in fact always above us, as some
recent examples from the (US) industry show, so we might just
as well not care - the bothering influences nothing - and do
what we do best and are trained to: code. Just like we don't
care if it's going to rain if we must hit the road anyway.

Sorry for making people feel uneasy, if I did by starting
this thread.
//Jim