IP Theft in the Linux Kernel

Søren Schmidt was browsing through the 2.4.10 linux kernel source when he saw something that looked a bit familiar. Too familiar in fact. Søren is the principle developer of FreeBSD's ATA drivers, including FreeBSD's support for ATA RAID cards, and as he looked through the linux/drivers/ide/ files the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. Read on for more.

"They just took my code and filed off the copyright" said Søren. "This is clearest with the two header files hptraid.h and pdcraid.h. Compare these with FreeBSD's ata-raid.h, and just look at the similarities." And it's true that these two header files certainly look like a chopped up copy of the FreeBSD header, after a quick search-and-replace. "The reading of the RAID config from the disks is their own code, but is clearly "inspired" from our code," said Søren, "but that's encouraged by the license. It's the verbatim use of the other code without retaining the copyright that's the problem."

ata-raid.h, and the other files, are copyright Søren, and released under the three clause BSD license, which includes the restriction "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice". So using these files, or significant portions of them, in your own code, without retaining the copyright information, as has happened here, is prohibited.

You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files.

Right now, Søren is in discussions with the authors of the Linux ATA drivers (employed by RedHat) to ensure that his copyright notice is returned to these and other files, and to ensure that this situation does not recur. And it is hoped that an amicable solution can be reached.

Of course everyone steals from BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Why innovate when you can steal the best?

Re:Er...

[cdraus]

The programmer probably didn't know how to insert that funny looking o character in "Soren" using vi, so just left it out...

Re:Er...

[OmegaDan]

It says a RedHat employe wrote the code ... the guy stole the code and probably played quake for 2 months. Thats why you strip off the copyright.

But that's nothing!!

[Seph]

Look at every C book, they stole word by word my helloworld.c program that I wrote some time ago!!

Re:Jumping to conclusions..

[jxqvg]

Yeah, I hate it when I accidentally search and replace a bunch of variable names in a block of code and then forget to leave out the BSD license notice.

Re:Are you sure it is a RedHat Employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Those darn microsoft employees. I bet one posed as a linux developer just to do this copyright enfringment.

boy that really gets my goat. stupid microsoft can't keep their hands out of anything!

Good Programmers Copy ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Great Programmers Steal.

Re:Er...

[Anonymous Coward]

Emacs could have handled that letter just fine!

:)

Re:Er...

[pi_rules]

He -might- have thought this was already documented by the manufacturer and semi-public-domain-ish knowledge. I would personally doubt it... but you never know. Could have been digging into tech documents on the cards and decided he'd just use the FreeBSD code to help him follow along, realized that it was exactly what he needed (changed the typedefs of some variables though)...and began coding some more.
At any rate, even if they were this ignorant of their violation it's just a bad idea not to cite where you got the information from in your code.

ie: /* I just threw numbers in here one night and started guessing. I think they work but I might be way off even, report bugs to [e-mail]. */

--or--

/* I ripped these structs from the FreeBSD driver written by Søren Schmidt... if it's broken blame him */

-- or maybe --

/* I'm going to pretend that these came to me magically in a dream one day. I figure RH's odds of finding a prophetic coder with visions such as these are pretty slim and guarantees me some serious job security. */

Linux hippies steal BSD code just like M$!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is funny!

Way to go leenoos..

I say lienix, you say lynix.. he says leenooks..

Shocked and Surprised Linux couldn't be more orig

[Jboy_24]

I am very shocked and surprised by this. Looking through the header files it is disapointing that the linux developers, supposedly people more open and original than their counterpoints would lower themselves to define variables in the same way BSD did.
I mean when it came to defining the variables for the cylinders for the drive they just used the name 'cylinders'! EXACTLY what BSD used!!! and for the number of disks on the raid0 they used raid0_disks!!!

I mean they should have defined it as num_of_boxed_platters_of_magneticly_coated_disks_c ontained_in_metal_boxes_configured_on_raid_0, perhaps my_aunt_Marlene0 (naming things after family is cool), perhaps in light of Sept11, osamin_shall_die_with_this_variable_0, fhlaehoiu23987y would have been better as well, R41D_RU37LZZZ_d15K5_0 or maybe an ascii art pictorial discription of the item, (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to picture this).

The only benifit of naming this the exact same way BSD did would be that it would be clearer and more easily understood for people who program many different unix based disk interfaces.

But who really benifits from that? Escpecially when someone doesn't get credit for making the second variable in a struct, 'disk_number'.

Re:Er...

[jasoegaard]

I just press ø.

Oh. I have a danish keybord.

--
Jens Axel Søgaard

Re:Er...

[CharlesDonHall]

The programmer probably didn't know how to insert that funny looking o character in "Soren" using vi, so just left it out...

Another reason to use a GUI editor! You can just find the character on the web and paste it in. When I first started doing Perl development, I quickly ran into a problem...which I worked around by adding this comment to all my scripts:

# My keyboard doesn't have a tilde, so I'm
# putting one here to cut-and-paste: ~

But after reading the article above, I'm wondering if that comment should have credited www.perl.com, which is where I found the original character...

Re:Er...

[hawk]

> i bet it was emacs. not vi. who uses vi? ;)

real men, of course.

to even *think* that an emacs user could write such code . . . oh, wait a minute, he didn't write it, making emacs more likely :)

hawk, who doesn't endanger his immortal soul with the heretical emacs

Act of Holy War

[Anonymous Coward]

We must protect our code. I propose a fatwa againat linux. We must join the jihad!!!! Destroy Linux Thieves!!!!!

Re:It's pronounced...

[Dirtside]

Wait a minute! Are you saying that these header files were written by Sauron? Because that's what came out of my mouth when I pronounced it the way you describe. One license to rule them all, eh?

Blame emacs

[zeda]

He probably just hit M-x accidentally-remove-copyright-header in emacs.

Happens to me all the time. Or was it diff --remove-copyright-header.

This is why...

[HamNRye]

You should never let people look at your source code...

~Hammy

Has to be said

[Mandelbrute]

Microsoft has incorporated BSD code into Windows various times,

This is also true:

Microsoft has incorporated BSOD code into Windows various times.

Re:And yet...

[Zardus]

I'm sure quite alot of OSS programmers have forgotten to give credit where its due. I'm not justifying copying Open Source code without giving credit, but its a fairly common mistake.

(Or what if, after having a few beers, they wrote a complete copy of the BSD code, from scratch!)

Re:And yet...

[philg]

No, no, no. Don't overgeneralize. This was clearly only HALF the programmer's fault -- the evil half. The good half was entirely unaware of the misappropriation, and worked to make good when he saw what was wrong.

Damn slashdotters, always blaming individuals when, clearly, fractions of individuals are responsible.

phil