Owners are initialized from allocations or from other owners. Assigning a value from a raw pointer to an owner pointer is not allowed. Raw pointers don’t guarantee ownership transfer; there is still may be an original owner which holds the resource and will attempt to release it. Note that assigning a value from owner to a raw pointer is fine; raw pointers are valid clients to access resources, but not to manage them.

gsl::owner<Socket*> socket = defaultSocket ? &defaultSocket : new Socket(); // C26406