Well, it's every developer's responsibility not to submit code that is not
his/her own, regardless whether the code is going into an open-source
product or not. (Although, if nobody sees the source of your product,
it's easy to get away with using large blocks of code in a manner contrary
to its license, as certain monopolistic corporations have been alleged to
have done.)
Many patches are submitted on the linux kernel dev list, except for those
that are done by folks that can commit them directly to the tree. I found
it interesting that a statement from somebody who claimed to have viewed
SCO's "evidence" stated that the Linux code examples were taken from the
kernel dev mailing list. However, patches that are submitted to the list
are not necessarily committed to the actual source tree, and if committed
are still subject to pre-commitment revision. This seems pretty shaky to
me, like exhibiting photos of someone driving south on I-75 on a
particular day as evidence that s/he was present in Miami at 12:15 on that
day.
Levi
> Well said.
> We as the open source community have the responsibility to protect
> ourselves
> from anything like this happening in the future.
>>
>> 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.
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