What's strange is that Dmitry continued to work for defcon after a stop work order, and also that Dmitry was originally invited to speak on stage (smells like consideration).

Based on the sum of all statements it continues to be very plausible that Dmitry basically had no on-paper relationship with anyone... and did everything on a pure friends and family basis. If so that is a huge awkward fuckup.

Also unfortunate is the possibility that if Dmitry is just some detached party trying to defend Entropic's honor, he basically started a firestorm which burned bridges between Entropic and defcon.

Once Dmitry started the whole thing, defcon immediately attacked the reputation of Entropic by saying they exercised bad faith in business and were incompetent and profligate. Defcon attacked so hard that there was no way to unring that bell. Then Entropic had no choice but to respond to defcon.

> We hear that the fimware developer had no contract with anyone.

I see this occasionally with small companies, usually it's more of a personal request from one of the employees to provide some code on a volunteer basis, perhaps solely because they are passionate about that sort of thing and someone knew that about them.

In the end, if the favor is upheld and they provide the code/binary/whatever to the company (who has a contract to deliver such code), then that company's upstream contract is still fulfilled, technically it doesn't matter that the coder was not an employee or contractor. The only real downside I see for this is legal liability for the company if they end up unable to provide for their customer, but that's between the two of them and their contract, the coder is basically not on the hook for any problems.