On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 09:06, Rock wrote:
> I don't comment often but this issue appears to be a consequence of the
> openness of the open source community itself, and as such begs for a
> resolution.
> I don't claim to know how patches or improvements are submitted by
> independent kernel programmers but it seems that some sort of disclaimer
> from them needs to be required before changes are incorporated into the
> Linux kernel. What if some programmer incorporates Unix code into their
> patch and that is incorporated into the kernel? What then? How would
> anyone know. Without a disclaimer stating that "no Unix code has been
> used", we have no way of assuring the open source community that the
> Linux kernel is really free of Unix code.
>
> I don't think that is asking too much of the programmers and would be
> easy to require before submitting code to be incorporated into the
> kernel.
It's impractical at best. I doubt many kernel people have much time to
trace down the origins of any piece of code that gets submitted. If
Linus et. al. spent all their time auditing code for potential
infringements, nothing would ever get done. There are so many potential
places "illegal" code could come from, and you can't possibly expect the
kernel guys to be familiar with all of them.
Linus has said in the past he doesn't care about patents and such. He's
just going to write the code, and if something comes up, it will be up
to the company who feels they've been wronged to bring forth the
complaint, and if/when that ever happens, the kernel team will deal with
it then. It's not worth worrying about it up front.
And any sort of verbal/written disclaimer doesn't have any legal weight
at all. Probably relevant are all the pirate rings that used to make
commercial software easily available with the "disclaimer" that "This
software is for archival use only. If you actually use this software,
you are expected to have a license." Saying something is not illegal
does not make it so.
On the flip side, if you've been watching the story, Linus pulled out an
old email from Cristof Helwig(sp?), a kernel hacker who, at one time,
was employed by Caldera. He was commenting on the possibility of
UnixWare code getting into the kernel and said, (paraphrasing), "Aside
from the fact that UnixWare internals are so different that code
couldn't readily be cut-n-pasted into Linux, there's rarely a piece of
code that doesn't get so thoroughly trashed and dissed, causing it to be
rewritten over and over before it gets accepted into the kernel, it
would be virtually unthinkable to imagine someone managing to get
UnixWare code directly into the Linux codebase."
-- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "We all enter this world in the | Support Electronic Freedom same way: naked; screaming; soaked | http://www.eff.org/ in blood. But if you live your | http://www.anti-dmca.org/ life right, that kind of thing |--------------------------- doesn't have to stop there." -- Dana Gould
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