IRIX and Software

I've spotted a tarball named Irix 6.5.5 source code on a site dedicated to share data between people My question is if it really contains the source code does it have any real value nowadays? The mentioned version was released in 1999 and doesn't support any 'modern' SGI hw
Thanks for sharing your opinion

It would depend what it had and what you want. The big problem is that it wouldn't be legal for someone to use a direct copy to insert support for hardware in something - you'd have to do a "dirty room/clean room" setup, and even then you'd possibly fall afoul of trade secret provisions.

It's probably just the kernel and some base support utilities, but there are some things that might (probably not, but depending on where it came from...) be in it that might be interesting, such as: SGI's "r" programs (rcp, rsh, rexec, etc.), so xBSD/Linux/Solaris versions that work for SGI netinsts could be built (not super necessary, we have DINA now).

DGL and IRIS GL - especially DGL on other platforms could be very nice.

Xsgi and graphics internal stuff that would help people to port support for X.org to the SGI hardware, also stuff that could help to understand the internals.

Most of the interesting stuff (DGL, Xsgi, graphics microcode, ARCS PROM, other trade-secrety stuff) is almost guaranteed not to be in there. It's probably just a base kernel. Even if it was the contaminated code problem would take some doing to get around.

Also, if it's on the net, people who really know what's going on have probably looked at it and taken the interesting stuff away already.

This code is extremely boring. It's just System V UNIX - Xsgi and the fun video drivers (the part that could assist with ports) aren't included. So it's just the source for a System V kernel, IRIX's hybrid System V / BSD core userland utils, and the basic support code for systems that had been long-since reverse engineered by the time it came out. Not worth legal trouble.

May I ask, really, what would you do if you had the full source code of 6.5.30, or windows 7 or whatever. I doubt a single individual would make any significant changes to it. At best, you'd find a way to recompile it, and then what, really.

For IRIX: you have one person who knows what they're doing read it and document the interesting bits (DGL, GL, graphics hardware, ARCS PROM, drivers, etc.) and then the documentation can be passed on to people to program support into xBSD, Linux, what-have-you. In short it would make reverse-engineering much easier.
The other, more legally questionable, thing you could do is integrate in bugfixes and security patches from other code.

For Windows, not sure what you'd do. Help the Eastern European/Chinese/Russian criminals break into more systems? Send MS suggestions that they'd ignore?

Hardware support. With the source to IRIX and Xsgi, a single talented individual could easily expand and improve the support for SGI systems in [Linux|NetBSD|OpenBSD|whatever open-source OS of choice]. There's still a lot about IRIX systems (especially the most recent ones) that nobody's bothered to reverse (or that was too difficult to reverse). Plus it'd be an excellent learning experience - things like the bringup process on ODYSSEY (which currently is understood at a generic level such as "this brings up RAM somehow, we copied it from the assembly dump of PROM") would no longer be a mystery.

You would need to find some way of laundering the process so your (xBSD/Linux/X.org) code wouldn't be contaminated, which adds another layer of difficulty, but not nearly as much as trying to reverse engineer from scratch would be.