There's a long industry history of stealing code, but I'm surprised to hear this story of Sun allegedly doing it.<p>My impression is that reason for the stealing usually makes sense. For example, a key library that's hard to write that's just copied into the source tree, ignoring licensing. Or an appliance developer didn't want to deal with licensing for Linux or BusyBox. Or an individual developer in over their head quietly copies code.<p>The time I heard an explainable incident happened with my code, was in mid/late-'90s. An acquaintance, who'd offered to be one of the testers for an unreleased Java desktop application I wrote, then reportedly ran it through a decompiler, and passed it off as his own code, in a demo to investors. He later acknowledged doing this, and said he'd send me a Sun (ha) workstation as compensation. I declined.<p>Then there are incidents for which the reason isn't obvious, like the one from the article. I speculate that sometimes the explanation might simply be that the perpetrator wasn't quite right in the head at the time, like in some famous cases of journalism fabrication.<p>An inexplicable one involving my code was when an open source developer took a substantial and novel package that I wrote, stripped out my name and license notices, including out of the main file, and posted the package with themself identified as the author. There were also a couple other incidents with that person that seemed like that hadn't yet learned how to play well with others, in engineering or open source. I asked a mutual acquaintance, in confidence, what was going on with that person. The acquaintance checked, and was also baffled. In that case, I suppose that maybe the perpetrator was going through a difficult time, and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it was a combination of unlikely accidents that looked worse than the intent was (which happens).<p>In the article's story of the Sun incident, I'm a little surprised that (speculating) an engineer could do this <i>despite</i> all the other people in engineering who might be in a position to notice something funny going on. And Sun had been the dot in some dotcoms by 2005, so presumably they had some strong engineering processes around what goes into product.<p>Maybe the demo was something put together by a systems engineer, working as part of a small marketing/sales team, rather than under an engineering organization, so a lot fewer engineers were aware of it?