Usenix President - Linux Needs Better Paper Trail 166
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'."
The only problem with that quote is... its entirel (Score:5, Interesting)
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 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.
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:3, Interesting)
But the point of their lawsuit is to prove that at least some of the code in Linux came from SCO's IP through IBM. They're damned sure not to point out any pasting they did. It would point to an apparent flaw in their logic.
(And whether that flaw is really a flaw, and not a dynamic company changing its policies, is a subject for another debate. But I won't represent them.)
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:5, Informative)
With a source code control system, you know that so and so added on such and such a date. You can then go to that person and ask them where they got it from if there's ever any question.
In the BSD world (I do a lot with FreeBSD), this has come in very handy when code disputes come up. Being able to talk to the actual people that inserted the code into FreeBSD has helped to clear up what otherwise might have been viewed as something improper.
I've tried to do similar things with versions of linux in the past, only to discover that I could, at best, find what version they came into the tree at, and who collected the patch and sent it to Linus. I wasn't able to track it further without searching public mailing lists for the information (with mixed results).
while you might believe that it will take 20 minutes to identify the code in question, my guess is that's overly optimistic, unless the code in question was contributed since bk. It usually takes me at least 5 minutes to find out where code comes from in FreeBSD when there's a question, and cvs annotate makes the process *MUCH* faster.
I'm not sure I'd disagree with your comments about SCO being able to come up with where the code came from relative to Linux.
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:5, Informative)
In the commercial world, you have change numbers which link to a documentation trail which shows who implemented something and why and who approved it. Linus is trying at least to improve the code provenance by looking at a certification chain between the patch generator, the maintainer and eventually Linus as release manager. Unfortunately, it still looks like a hunt through LKML for the documentation as you suggest.
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:5, Informative)
cvs annotate is an excellent first start to see where code came into the tree. Other tools allow one to see where the code really came from in the face of formatting changes and the like.
Like I've said in prior posts, having this information is invaluable. It also allows one to more easily back out changes that might be tainted, reguardless of where they come from, since you know all the parts to that change, which is impossible with the changelog data. In this respect, bk is better than cvs since bk's change mechanism links multiple files that have changed, while CVS does not.
You *MAY* have this, or you may not. There are many shops that don't have this level of beaurocracy. However, I've never worked for any place that has had this independent of an underlying source code control system (and many places that didn't have source code control systems, let alone change numbers).
The issue can be further complicated if there's been a cross fertilization between projects for things like device drivers. Project A figures out how to do feature Z and project B integrates it. B then figures out Y and project A integrates that. Project C takes code from a data sheet and includes that under license X and Project A then takes it and incldues it under license Y and then Project B wants to bring it it, but is unsure if they can because they see substantially similar code under both X and Y licenses, not being aware of the common datasheet code example being present and gets confused. In situations like this, a clear SCM trail can help sort out who to talk to and how to resolve what might appear to be something bad.
I've seen many organic patches/drivers grow up over the years in linux that are litterally impossible to track down who wrote what originally. Some have email addresses, some do not, some have had them removed, some email addresses are stale, etc. In such a chaotic enviornment, it can be difficult to know where code came from. There are many strengths to this model, but code history isn't one of them.
Warner
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:2)
Yes, I'm aware of the problem of 'organic code', something that was based on something from another OS that was cribbed out of a databook. However, when a change is moved from one project to another, you can still trace back by cross referencing the change that you based it on and only importing it if you k
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:2)
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:2)
>such and such a date. You can then go to that person and ask them where
>they got it from if there's ever any question.
While ofcourse a source control system will help alot, it won't always reveal the whole truth about
where the code comes from. For the 2.6 kernel you can view the changes here [bkbits.com].
On thing you might notice is alot of changes from e.g. akpm(Andrew Morton). But he didn't write that all code.
Alot of the changes commited by
Re:The only problem with that quote is... its enti (Score:2)
Commercial SW needs better paper trails too. (Score:1, Informative)
Just because a corporation has a SourceSafe system doesn't mean people actually enter into the comments when they steal GPL'd code.
Good timing for this then. (Score:2, Informative)
Good time for a link, then. (Score:1, Informative)
Source (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Source (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Source (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Source (Score:2, Funny)
The Santa Claus Operation?
Re:Source (Score:2)
paper trail? (Score:5, Funny)
wondered what the hell paper is.
Oddly enough, all of those thousand geeks could tell you what a scroll is.
Re:paper trail? (Score:5, Funny)
how this applies to Linux, I have no idea. no need for the core dump jokes... we've seen em all.
Re:paper trail? (Score:1, Redundant)
Well, of course. Your mage writes spells onto scrolls, or finds them. I mean, what else would a scroll be?
BTW, What the hell is paper anyways? Is it anything like papyrus?
Re:paper trail? (Score:1)
Sort of. They're both made of wood.
Unfortunately, while you can make papyrus with a good hand planar, it takes a dickens of a time to chew wood shavings into something that when dried makes good paper.
Not worth the trouble, IMO.
Re:paper trail? (Score:2, Interesting)
If Linux is going to need a paper tra
Re:paper trail? (Score:1)
Huh. I don't doubt you, it's just tha
Re:paper trail? (Score:1, Funny)
And that would be... an American public school?
Re:paper trail? (Score:2)
Sure. That's an object you can collect in your favorite online game and sell on eBay. It's really a collection of bits - virtual property. What this has to do with paper, I have no idea.
Re:paper trail? (Score:3, Insightful)
An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved 'write-once' update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called 'handwriting' technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terri
News at 11 (Score:3, Informative)
Coming soon...Pamela Jones' Grokline.... (Score:4, Informative)
It's out now :] (Score:3, Informative)
GrokLine [grokline.net]
Groklaw story on Grokline [groklaw.net]
Site's a little slow (Score:2, Informative)
Note: This doesn't mean I agree with this crap. As a coder, I can certainly understand their wanting to write code more than document everything. Really, shouldn't CVS logs be as much "proof" you wrote it as you need? It's far more work to try to fake writing it by changing other's code, than it is to just do the work itself.
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:2)
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:1)
WE who?
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:1)
Not at all. Your CVS logs will show who committed the code, but not who wrote it. The commit also needs to attribute the author. Looking at logs for various projects, some do this, but many do not.
Besides which, Linux isn't under CVS, it's under Bitkeeper. And the Bitkeeper repository is still pretty new.
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:2)
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:2)
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:2)
Your implication was that CVS is somehow deficient because of this, which is what I was trying to adress, but I fail to see how that could be if no other system exists that can do any better.
Re:Site's a little slow (Score:2)
But ultimately that's about as much "proof" as one is ever going to have, no matter what software or process or combination of the two one employs.
Sorry I mistook your point.
'he said-she said' (Score:5, Funny)
Glad I could clear that up.
A new agreement (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A new agreement (Score:2)
Or is there one around already? The only reason I continue to maintain a Windows partition is because our time cards are electronic and our digital signature software is Windows-only.
Re:A new agreement (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A new agreement (Score:2)
Please Mod Parent Up!
Re:A new agreement (Score:2)
GnuPG, as a standalone product and a sort of industry standard. OpenSSL, libmcrypt, and libmhash as libraries of algorithms and functions, the latter two also with PHP interfaces. And *many* more. :)
Ownership trail? (Score:1)
Isn't the whole purpose of GPL that no-one can "own" any of the code?
Re:Ownership trail? (Score:2, Informative)
No. It's that no one can take away your right to fork the software, your right to use the software as you see fit, your right (or your proxy's right) to examine and change the software if you desire, and your right to redistribute the software, as long as you allow other people the same rights.
GPL does NOT grant you rights... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:GPL does NOT grant you rights... (Score:2)
Where do you think the government got the rights in the *FIRST* place?
Let me ask you this, to help illustrate my point...
Does government create people, or do people create the government?
--
So when 2 buildings in America blow up, that's called Terrorism.
But when America genocides a nation, its your patriotic duty to kill others and Win the War.
Re:Ownership trail? (Score:3, Informative)
All contributors to Linux still own the sections that they contributed. Some projects are run differently, for instance the FSF owns the code to all of the official gnu projects, because they ask contributors to assign copyright to them.
The ownership is important if you later want to change the license, for example by granting somebody permission to do something that isn't usually
Re:Ownership trail? (Score:2)
The GPL gives the users some rights - such as the ability to modify the code, and redistribute the code.
Even after distributing code under the GPL, the author could decide to distribute it under a commercial license.
Re:Ownership trail? (Score:1)
The GPL is not about ownership, it is about distribution rights.
The ownership remains with the Copyright holder. In the case of the GPL the Copyright holder allows for redistribution under the GPL.
The owner could release the same code under a different license, whereas somebody who received the code under the GPL cannot.
Need To Show No One Previously Owned The Code (Score:3, Informative)
What the GPL says is not pertinent to that issue. Put the SCO hysteria aside momentarily. This guy is speaking from his own experience in a very similar environment: When someone gets a lawyer and says they owned some of the code in your project, you'd better come up with documentati
It's not really a problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this where the need for a paper trail comes in? Suppose someone takes the kernel and starts their own independent development on it. Hypothetically, in five years, they could rewrite or replace over 50% of the kernel with their own code. From what I understand the GPL license requires that any code that it becomes part of must also be GPL. If the total code package is several million lines, however, who is going to pay to subpoena the source code for a commerical product to prove that it was indeed started from a GPL/open source project? Who will pay to have the code audited and what prevents a potentially unscrupulous commerical entity from playing mix and match with subroutines so carefully that the resulting audit would take more time to arrange properly that to actually audit the lines one by one?
I suppose, in this case, the paper trail wouldn't make a darn bit of difference. The paper trail isn't going to make it any easier to subpoena source code from a commercial entity if they're stonewalling.
Enter my tin-foil argument that Windows9x/2x is nothing more than badly mangled Linux and a customized window manager built with a crytpically designed compiler--but no one ever gets to see the source code so they'll never be able to prove it.
Code Slippage (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, he was so pissed off about the whole stupidity that it motivated him to stay up an extra two hours hacking away. So technically, some of his code should be attributed to me, right?
Much like how some of that code should be credited to Pizza Hut, Starbucks, and a few different candy bars. So where's the documentation on that?
All the changelogs, the comments, and any other bits of documentation aren't enough. Where's the credit to the pizza delivery guy? He helped develop some of that code! Ingrates, I tell ya.
Funny how this coincides with... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Funny how this coincides with... (Score:1)
He said She said (Score:1, Funny)
He said "If I tell you, i'd have to kill you".
And ironically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, I would imagine that pretty much every kernel code submission is traceable to it's submitter. As far as I know, every specific line of code that has been brought up by SCO has been tracked down and attributed to it's submitter. Beyond that, there's really no way for BSD, Linux or anybody else to _know_ that the person submitting a patch really owns the copyright to it, or is acting as an authorized agent of their employer who owns the copyright to it. At some point, there is good faith. Yes, a well-documented paper trail would be nice, but requiring patch submitters to submit signed documentation with their patches would place an immense administrative burden on somebody, and it wouldn't prove that no copyright infringement has occurred, it would just blame-shift to whoever submitted the patch. I don't think that would legally remove the possibility that an unscrupulous company could go fishing for damages, a la SCO. It would also effectively remove the bazaar-like openness that Linux has, in contrast with more closed, insular projects with their rigid committer lists and uberpolitical machinations (XFree86 anyone?).
But I guess from a PR perspective this guy has a good point. Having some big pile of papers to point to and say "look, this documents that all contributers have copyright to their patches, and every line of code is accounted for" - this might help dissuade outrageous claims like SCOs and allay the fears of the business community, which likes to know that there are reams of bureaucratic documentation proving that the code is clean.
Re:And ironically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, no. It can be pretty difficult to know where a particular line of code ultimately came from. It can be done, but it will be time consuming. That's because Linus has lots of filters in place before the code reaches him, and historically, no formal repository for the submissions to sort it out. So while you can find out relatively fast that the John gave a patch to Linus, it's much harder to find out who gave that patch to John, and who gave it to the person who gave it to John.
You Linux advocates need to stop taking every piece of constructive criticism as an attack! If there is a problem, you should go fix it, instead of arguing that it doesn't exist.
But I guess from a PR perspective this guy has a good point.
This "guy" is the Grand Master of unencumbered, free and open software. He's also a 32nd Degree Kernel Hacker. When he speaks, you should listen.
Re:And ironically... (Score:1)
Re:And ironically... (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think I ever said I was a Linux "advocate" - I advocate the right tool for the job. Sometimes it's Linux, sometimes it's not.
I take all people's opinions and weigh them based on their own value, unless somebody has demonstrated a track record with me of excellent quality thought. I won't accept anybody's argument by authority, thank you very much. I do however think that everybody has known for some time that Linux kernel development needed more structure, needed SCM and
Re:And ironically... (Score:2, Informative)
I apologize if I singled out your specific instance of this attitude.
obvious: a little late?? (Score:2)
How many closed source people copy code? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone out there have personal knowledge?
Re:How many closed source people copy code? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't tell you about the industry as a whole, but so far I haven't seen even one case of a large body of source that didn't have code cribbed from somewhere else (my current employer excluded, I haven't been here long enough to know one way or the other).
Often this is not widely known, i.e. only one developer might know it happened.
I do note that over time the practice has become more strongly discouraged. I believe it was the GPL tha
What verification mechanisms are there? (Score:1, Redundant)
Surely he means PDF (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Surely he means PDF (Score:1)
And I think (Score:2)
FSF compliancy (Score:2)
So Marshall (+ Simoniker) missed today's news??? (Score:2)
Pot, Kettle, Black (Score:1)
Yes, it's an important topic, but Kirk choosing Linux as his example is just plain wacko.
Re:Pot, Kettle, Black (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pot, Kettle, Black (Score:2)
FreeBSD commmit messages routinely contain submitted by: lines. The commit logs are routinely scrubbed for contributors that wind up in the handbook. FreeBSD has been using CVS for 8 years longer than Linus has been using bk, which documents where changes come from much better than linux's former source code control system. The FreeBSD
SCO *WILL* look foolish? (Score:2, Funny)
In the end ? I like to think there's no time like the present.
Don't worry about it, except for big additions (Score:3, Informative)
Meanwhile, SCOX [yahoo.com] is down to 4.74 today. Volume is about a third of the 3-month average; they're falling off the investment radar. IBM's latest set of legal moves put SCO in worst shape than they've been since the litigation started. SCO has an earnings call and webcast [yahoo.com] on June 2. Tune in and hear Darl try to talk his way out of this one.
What? (Score:4, Interesting)
So what? There is a basic flaw in this argument! In the USA anyway, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Anybody alleging that source was stolen and placed into Linux must prove that source code:
a. existed somewhere prior to being placed into Linux
b. was stolen, not just happens to resemble code that might have been developed independently by someone else
In short, there should be no burden of proof on Linux's part to prove that the source was not stolen; the burden of proof must be on the accuser to prove that the source was stolen!
Knowing who submitted exactly which piece of code to Linux will not drain the swamp of 'he said-she said' about where code came from'. In fact, it will make it a lot worse. Consider: company A claims that some portion of Linux source, submitted by person B, was stolen. Person B had business dealings with company A prior to or during the time that the source was submitted. Company A will say that this proves the source was stolen from them since person B obviously had opportunity! They will claim this even if person B had dealings totally unrelated to software within company A.
Re:What? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is only true in criminal trials, and not always true even then. Copyright is civil matter, so the standard is usually "on the balance of the evidence". If one side can produce a pile of documents relating to the development of some code, and the other side can only produce a guy who says "I wrote it" then it is a pretty safe bet that the side with all the ducuments will win.
Sound stupid? Welcome to the wacky world of intellectual property.
Re:What? (Score:2)
It might sound strange to folks with a modern education, but the notion of innocent until proven guilty was really designed to protect the innocent. It was not designed as a clever way to secure title to the things one steals. Filing the VIN off the engine block doesn't give you title to the Porsche. Nor should it be used as j
This is ridiculous. (Score:5, Insightful)
RMS:I told you so (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:RMS:I told you so (Score:2)
Precisely. It would have made SCO charges much more difficult to come up with in the first place, and much easier to dismiss now.
The way I see Linus' initial refusal to request assignments or to allow FSF to do so, and his current partial implementation of the idea, it looks like a marketing get-to-the-market-fast idea: do it quick and dirty, once you're established you can go back and fix it. Only you will only fix
foo (Score:4, Interesting)
Linus says they're working on it (Score:2)
[RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission (Score:4, Informative)
Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 06:48:09 GMT
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
To: Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: [RFD] Explicitly documenting patch submission
Hola!
This is a request for discussion..
Some of you may have heard of this crazy company called SCO (aka "Smoking
Crack Organization") who seem to have a hard time believing that open
source works better than their five engineers do. They've apparently made
a couple of outlandish claims about where our source code comes from,
including claiming to own code that was clearly written by me over a
decade ago.
People have been pretty good (understatement of the year) at debunking
those claims, but the fact is that part of that debunking involved
searching kernel mailing list archives from 1992 etc. Not much fun.
For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was
original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we
obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on
having other ways to document the origin of the code.
So, to avoid these kinds of issues ten years from now, I'm suggesting that
we put in more of a process to explicitly document not only where a patch
comes from (which we do actually already document pretty well in the
changelogs), but the path it came through.
Why the full path, and not just originator?
These days, most of the patches in the kernel don't actually get sent
directly to me. That not just wouldn't scale, but the fact is, there's a
lot of subsystems I have no clue about, and thus no way of judging how
good the patch is. So I end up seeing mostly the maintainers of the
subsystem, and when a bug happens, what I want to see is the maintainer
name, not a random developer who I don't even know if he is active any
more. So at least for me, the _chain_ is actually mostly more important
than the actual originator.
There is also another issue, namely the fact than when I (or anybody else,
for that matter) get an emailed patch, the only thing I can see directly
is the sender information, and that's the part I trust. When Andrew sends
me a patch, I trust it because it comes from him - even if the original
author may be somebody I don't know. So the _path_ the patch came in
through actually documents that chain of trust - we all tend to know the
"next hop", but we do _not_ necessarily have direct knowledge of the full
chain.
So what I'm suggesting is that we start "signing off" on patches, to show
the path it has come through, and to document that chain of trust. It
also allows middle parties to edit the patch without somehow "losing"
their names - quite often the patch that reaches the final kernel is not
exactly the same as the original one, as it has gone through a few layers
of people.
The plan is to make this very light-weight, and to fit in with how we
already pass patches around - just add the sign-off to the end of the
explanation part of the patch. That sign-off would be just a single line
at the end (possibly after _other_ peoples sign-offs), saying:
Signed-off-by: Random J Developer <random@developer.org>
To keep the rules as simple as possible, and yet making it clear what it
means to sign off on the patch, I've been discussing a "Developer's
Certificate of Origin" with a random collection of other kernel
developers (mainly subsystem maintainers). This would basically be what
a developer (or a maintainer that passes through a patch) signs up for
when he signs off, so that the downstream (upstream?) developers know
that it's all ok:
Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.0
By making a contribution to this project, I certify that:
(a) The contribution was created in whole or in part by me and I
have the
No matter how convoluted... (Score:5, Insightful)
If we knew where every last keystroke came from, there would still be the "bob is lying, that keystroke didn't come from him, he stole it from his bos/frind/company/disassembly-fo-windows or whatever. Or worse, he typed in the code but he got the idea from watching the wonderful-world-of-Disny while reading Cryptonomicon so Eisner and Stephensen are the inventors and deserve X in consideration.
Many jobs worth doing are only worth doing to a certian standard of completeness. The problem with the porely-named Intellectual Property domain is that, reguardless of whether ideas want to be free or $40 a barrel, the boundary and origin of all ideas is undocumented-bastardary at best.
All works of any creative mind are, at least in part, stolen from the fertile field of experience.
There is no fixing that, and the supposition that all the progenitors of what came before do *NOT*, a-prioria, deserve recognition and a stake.
Turning the provenance of each line of code into a preverse kind of Oscal(tm) acceptance speach *still* wont insure that someone isn't slighted somewhere.
"I'd like to thank the academy, and my third grade comp-sci teacher for this for-loop, without them I would have never understood that pre-increment saves a temporary. And of course a shout-out to the CPU manufacturer, without whom I'd have never had a chance at direct increment of non-register memory. And of course my Mom, who never let me leave the table without eating all my peas; if it weren't for her I'd have never learned the value of bounds-checking in the completion of a problem domian. I know I'm forgetting someone, but you have all been so wonderful..." -- Rob White, Linux Kernel 6.2 Changelog for kernel.c line 722.
NOTE: The Above attribution is Under Dispute from the GCC board of optimizers for failure to credit the optimizing community's efforts in envisioning the need for loop unroling and the value of peep-hole allocation of registers...
Really, how bad does "intellectual property" have to get before people get it into their heads that the Founding Fathers *DID* understand that you cannot own an idea. The absence of computer science from their accumen doesn't mean that these topics are sacrocant, wholly new, and innumerable to that prior understanding.
Clue please people...
The email lists and usenet *IS* the paper trail (Score:2)
To quote Linus Torvalds [lwn.net]:
I read the headline as... (Score:2)
Groklaw is asking for help with this (Score:2)
Innocent until proven guilty, that old thing! (Score:2)
SCO couldn't and they spent a lot of Bill's money trying to convince people that they could.
TWW
Eben Moglen talked about this. (Score:2)
With their typical prescience, the FSF discussed this issue. Read the transcript of Eben Moglen's talk [groklaw.net] or listen to the talk [harvard.edu] and you'll find this segment about one hour into the talk (during the Q&A section):
Re:Maybe he should read SlashDot (Score:2)
you know what i mean.. like when you tell the dog to roll over and he sits instead so you blurt out sit before his but hits the ground to make it look like he listened.
Re:Maybe he should read SlashDot (Score:5, Insightful)
And maybe *you* should read RTFA (the McKusick interview)? He says explicitly that the paper trail was lacking "until recently" (by which he means the switch to BitKeeper). Maybe you should also learn some respect for people like McKusick who've been hacking free Unix since back when Linus was a kid. Among other things, this guy pretty much invented the modern Unix "fast file system", from which ext2 takes a lot of ideas. More recently, he's been responsible for softupdates in UFS (gaining the speed benefits of async mounts without compromising filesystem integrity in case of crashes).
Re:Maybe he should read SlashDot (Score:2)
If the question mark's good enough for Carl Sandburg [bartleby.com], and a hundred other eminent authors, it's good enough for me. Perhaps you need an education in English.
And when you're done with that, maybe *you* should work on recognizing tongue-in-cheek comments.
Perhaps when you try to be humorous you should not say "someone mark this story as redundant". That only makes you look sound petula
..what post? (Score:1)
Re:infOrmative M4reMare (Score:1, Offtopic)
Right. The link text makes no sense, and the link points to the wrong site. Even the goatse.cx trolls are going downhill these days.
Re:What's wrong now? (Score:2)
Now, an exemption for BSD-licensed software, that might be useful.
Re:Grokline's UNIX Ownership History Project (Score:2)