That is a very, very simple question, and I expect a very, very simple and straightforward, honest answer.

What I meant to write was:

One can not hold one in violation of an EULA or any other kind of license because of reverse engineering.

Reverse engineering is perfectly legal, in addition to being unprovable. Nobody can prove that someone else reverse engineered something.

That’s one. Two, and this is even recognized legally, you cannot be found in violation of a license for reimplementing something which you have a knowledge or understanding of, because nobody can take away from you that which you know.

So a developer X working on technology Y is prefectly within his legal rights to go an implement the same algorithm/code/idea so long as the code is written from scratch, i.e. not identical or a clone of the original (in which case, it’s just a regular copy, and that would be infringement.)

Lastly, the CDDL does not prevent any code licensed under it to be integrated elsewhere; it is the GPL that is problematic and that tries to prohibit such actions by imposing restrictions.

I do not believe that a license discussion is in order here.

My question to Theodore is very simple:

is Theodore Ts’o criticising because he wants to bash on Sun and on OpenSolaris, or is he criticising because he would like to become a memember of the OpenSolaris community, and contribute to OpenSolaris?

That is a very, very simple question, and I expect a very, very simple and straightforward, honest answer.

There’s far too much FUD around tainting, as I discovered when we were getting OpenJDK off the ground. My view is that there is little risk of tainting for most of us, and the the measures most communities have in place relating to it are a double-protection thing. I think it serves more to divide us as a FOSS community when it is applied community:community and I think that’s a shame.

(Naturally IANAL and TINLA)

OpenSolaris code is licenced under the CDDL. You may not copy code from CDDL licenced projects to GPL licenced projects, and vice versa.

In addition to copying code, there is also the possibility of tainting it by other means.

Let’s say a former Adobe hacker started contributing code to the GIMP, Adobe could reasonably claim that the hacker was reproducing Adobe copyrighted stuff as free software without having the right to do so. They might also make patent claims, for example.

So while there is absolutely no problem with Ted contributing to OpenSolaris, if he’s contributing in the same area as he contributed to the Linux kernel, then there’s a chance that he’s reproducing (perhaps subconsciously) code which is non-trivial, and which came from Linux.

Which is a licence infringement.

Concretely, I don’t expect any Linux kernel hackers to start helping with OpenSolaris, and vice versa.

Are you saying Theodore is somehow prevented from contributing code and/or patches to the OpenSolaris project?

I can’t fathom how a person would be legally prevented from working on existing piece of OpenSolaris code, or writing new OpenSolaris contributions from scratch.

It’s great to see that some of the Linux kernel developers are engaging in a conversation with the OpenSolaris community, and I see this as a start of great things to come.

You seem to really want Sun to release control of OpenSolaris code and make the community be able to contribute more easily.

At first, I regarded your essays as nothing more than slamming on the competition. But now that I think about it, will you answer me this:

since you seem to want Sun to release control, and since you seem to want Sun to make it easy to contribute to OpenSolaris… let’s say they do that.

If Sun does release control of OpenSolaris, will you contribute to OpenSolaris? You seem to want Sun to do what you say, well, are you asking them to do this just because you want to slam OpenSolaris in a big scheme of things(TM)…

…or do you ask out of genuine interest and want to contribute and be a part of the OpenSolaris community?