Usenix President - Linux Needs Better Paper Trail

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'."

Comments

The only problem with that quote is... its entirel

[SeanTobin]

Dating back to when linux (the kernel) didn't even have a version number, code was always attributed to where it came from. I'm sure everyone is familiar with at least the changelog and its attributions. And of course actual comments with names and email addresses are all over the sourcecode itself.

Now, Mr. McKusick might have a partial point. Its entirely possible that some gremlin over at Caldera took a bunch of SCO's 'Intelectual' Property and threw it into the main kernel under the GPL. In which case once the lines of code are actually identified, I suspect we will know who contributed them in under 20 minutes (10 minutes of which will be the article sitting on /. in The Mysterious Future!) In the unlikely event of SCO ever saying which lines are thiers, we may end up with the interesting situation where a Caldera/SCO employee put them there - and get to slap SCO for abusing the legal system.

In any event, I'd be willing to put money on Linux's source code source documentation beating SCO's out any day of the week.

A new agreement

[ch-chuck]

I guess, in the spirit of the GNU GPL, they'll have to come up with something, call it the FDA - a "Full Disclosure Agreement" that you *must* sign before contributing code, stating that you WILL tell everybody about the project and publish your code contribution, sort of a bizarro-world NDA.