Matt B wrote:
I'm not touchin' any of this.
Reminds me an awful lot of the story of the PowerVR leak's cautionary tale: https://libv.livejournal.com/26972.html
Luc writes essentially two things there;
1. He had previously worked with those leaked materials under a contract and decided not to view the leak.
That's of course up to him, and noone else knows his contract situation.
2. He claims that someone studying the leaked software becomes "tainted" and could not work on other software for same hardware.
I'm not convinced that this claim is correct, but I do expect that it could vary on one hand with jurisditction and on another with individual contract situations.
The few NDAs that I've seen always had a clause to explicitly exempt materials made available through no breach of (that) contract, and while I am not a lawyer I have always understood a leak (by someone else) to fit that.
Either way, any leaked Intel code can obviously not be contributed to the coreboot project, except possibly by Intel.
Only Intel can publish their code under GPL, if anyone can.
Now that source code for some modern platforms seems to be publically available, actually by far the smartest thing that Intel could do is exactly that - to publish the their source code under GPL.
Anyone interested in the code can get it now, so Intel would be far better off working *with* that community, instead of working against it.
But Intel's contract situation may not allow them to do so. In that case really everyone loses, except perhaps bad guys who don't care about contracts anyway and now save lots of reverse engineering effort
I'm curious to see what if anything comes of this.
//Peter