Tuesday, August 19, 2003

In a quiet Las Vegas conference room, the company offers customers, partners and the merely curious the chance to view controversial Linux code for themselves. [CNET News.com] But what they don't get to see is an audit trail convincingly certifying the alleged provenance of that code. And even if they could show a trail leading from AT&T code to Linux code, they would have to show that it got into Linux via IBM, rather than through some other route. There were so many AT&T source licenses around in the 80s that the code could have got into general use in many different ways. If this goes to discovery, it will be interesting to see what kind of computer forensics will come into play to determine code provenance. 11:08:58 AM