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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'."

1 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Maybe he should read SlashDot by rsidd · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Maybe Mr. McKusick should have read this earlier post about how Linus is already on top of it.

    And maybe *you* should read RTFA (the McKusick interview)? He says explicitly that the paper trail was lacking "until recently" (by which he means the switch to BitKeeper). Maybe you should also learn some respect for people like McKusick who've been hacking free Unix since back when Linus was a kid. Among other things, this guy pretty much invented the modern Unix "fast file system", from which ext2 takes a lot of ideas. More recently, he's been responsible for softupdates in UFS (gaining the speed benefits of async mounts without compromising filesystem integrity in case of crashes).