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Usenix President - Linux Needs Better Paper Trail

Posted by simoniker on from the follow-the-shredded-lawsuits dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Usenix Association president Marshall Kirk McKusick is a veteran of BSD's intellectual property scuffle with AT&T in the 1990s, and he's got some thoughts and advice for the keepers of the Linux kernel going forward, commenting: 'There isn't a well-documented ownership trail with Linux. So, they have opened themselves up to a swamp of 'he said-she said' about where code came from'."

2 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Funny how this coincides with... by yarrick · · Score: 5, Informative

    Slashdot: Process Improvements Wasn't Linus just talking about authors signing kernel submissions?

  2. Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti by imp · · Score: 5, Informative

    The changelog is insufficient documentation. It contains vague attributions that something changed somewhere in the code. It isn't specific as to what lines of code changed. Later, when you go back and try to find where a set of lines came from, a changelog doesn't help much.

    With a source code control system, you know that so and so added on such and such a date. You can then go to that person and ask them where they got it from if there's ever any question.

    In the BSD world (I do a lot with FreeBSD), this has come in very handy when code disputes come up. Being able to talk to the actual people that inserted the code into FreeBSD has helped to clear up what otherwise might have been viewed as something improper.

    I've tried to do similar things with versions of linux in the past, only to discover that I could, at best, find what version they came into the tree at, and who collected the patch and sent it to Linus. I wasn't able to track it further without searching public mailing lists for the information (with mixed results).

    while you might believe that it will take 20 minutes to identify the code in question, my guess is that's overly optimistic, unless the code in question was contributed since bk. It usually takes me at least 5 minutes to find out where code comes from in FreeBSD when there's a question, and cvs annotate makes the process *MUCH* faster.

    I'm not sure I'd disagree with your comments about SCO being able to come up with where the code came from relative to Linux.