Linus's request for discussion made hismotivation clear:Some of you may have heard of this crazy company called SCO (aka"Smoking Crack Organization") who seem to have a hard timebelieving that open source works better than their five engineersdo. They've apparently made a couple of outlandish claims aboutwhere our source code comes from, including claiming to own codethat was clearly written by me over a decade ago.He notes that the process of debunking these claims, while highlyeffective, has not been entirely fun. As a way of making life easier whenthe next SCO comes along, Linus is proposing a lightweight mechanism whichwould document how each patch finds its way into the kernel. In essence,this scheme would require each patch to contain at least one line like: Signed-off-by: Some kernel hacker One such line would be added by each person who handles the patch on itsway to the mainline kernel. Together, these lines would document theoriginator of the patch and the path it took before it was merged. Eachdeveloper, by "signing off" on the patch in this way, would indicate thathe or she has the right to submit it to the kernel under a free license -either by virtue of having written the code, or by having obtained it froma source which allows this form of redistribution. Companies which requirereview of code contributed to external projects can designate a person whomust sign off on patches before they go out.This procedure is a far cry from, for example, the full-blown copyright assignmentrequired from contributors to GNU projects. Contributions to the kernelwill still require no physical, signed papers, no assignment of copyright,no indemnification, and no documented permission from the contributor'semployer. The Free Software Foundation, with its assignment policy, istrying to set itself up as the owner and custodian of the GNU system, withclear title to the code,the ability to specify the license under which that code will be released and toenforce the terms of that license. The kernel hackers, instead, seem tofeel that they can get by without such a custodian, wish to retainownership of their code, and, as the netfilter team has demonstrated,they feel entirely capable of enforcing their own licenses.The kernel system is, instead, aimed entirely at documentation. The nexttime somebody questions the legitimacy of code in the kernel, it would benice to be able to point out, quickly, exactly where the code came from.In this way, perhaps, people can spend less time digging through ancientmail archives and more time developing. For this reason,suggestions varying from GPG-signing of patches to the (poorlyreceived) idea of adopting an ISO-9000process will probably not be implemented. Some tweaking will probablyhappen, but whatever system finally gets adopted will remain a simple,lightweight documentation mechanism.While the new kernel contribution scheme is aimed at documenting futurecontributions, the just-launched Grokline project is trying to documentthe past. From the site:This is an open, community-based, collaborative research project, aliving history, designed to carefully trace the ownership historyof UNIX and UNIX-like code with the goal of reducing, oreliminating, the amount of software subject to superficiallyplausible but ultimately invalid copyright, patent and trade secretclaims against Linux or other free and open source software.The project has put together a basic Unix timeline, and is soliciting inputfrom anybody who can help document where all this code came from.Grokline will, without doubt, yield no end of interesting historicalinformation. One can't help wondering, however, if the community isn'tgearing up to fight last year's war. The SCO Group has done us atremendous favor by showing that (1) finding copyright infringementsin free software (and the Linux kernel in particular) really is hard, and(2) the community will unite with devastating effectagainst anybody who seeks to profit from baseless attacks on freesoftware. It is hard to imagine another company wanting to be the nextSCO. The next time a copyright claim is raised against free software, theclaimants will be well advised to have their evidence in place from thebeginning - and to be right.If there is another SCO-scale war in our near future, it will probably notinvolve copyrights. It will be, instead, a patent fight. Unless it servesto establish prior art, documentation of the provenance of code will not behelpful in a patent case. It is also worth noting that the SCO case hasforced a remarkable alignment of interests between many large,deep-pocketed companies and the broader free software community. Thatalignment of interests may well be absent in a patent battle. Next year'spatent war may not be fought off as easily as this year's copyright and(formerly) trade secret suit. By all means, we should be documenting whereour code comes from, and, in general, doing our best to ensure that it has beencontributed legitimately. But it would be a mistake to believe that thisdocumentation alone will be sufficient to defend us from all "intellectualproperty" charges. (Log in to post comments) Documenting kernel code provenance Posted May 27, 2004 3:35 UTC (Thu) by error27 (subscriber, #8346) [Link]
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