Re: regarding the Solaris trap

[Andrew Walrond <andrew at walrond dot org>]

On Tuesday 01 February 2005 05:32, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> Some people might have heard about Sun's release of the Solaris sources
> under their dubious license.  This license is obviously intended to be
> incompatible with the GPL.  Therefore:
>
> Nobody who intends to contribute to glibc must look at anything but the
> public header files of the Solaris libc and related libraries.
>
> If you did or intend to do, don't send any patches.  Reporting bugs is
> OK, but do not go into any details regarding the implementation they
> use.  We will be extra careful to require assignments for any
> significant piece of work.  If you assign code and embed into
> contributed code any knowledge of that implementation, you are
> invalidating the assignment.  It is especially important that everybody
> with blanket assignments in place follows this.
>
> It's a trap, don't fall into it.
>

Assuming this trap is real and intentional, you paint Sun in a most unpleasant 
light. And I assume this dire warning is equally applicable to the linux 
kernel?

Is this discussed in more depth elsewhere? I'd like to understand the nature 
of this trap.

Andrew Walrond