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Response to Samizdat from Ilkka Tuomi

Ilkka Tuomi's research on contributions to the Linux Kernel is cited in Ken Brown's Samizdat to support Brown's kooky hypothesis that Linus copied code from Minix. The final version of Tuomi's paper has now been published in First Monday. Abstract:

Evolution of the Linux Credits file: Methodological challenges and reference data for Open Source research by Ilkka Tuomi

This paper presents time-series data that can be extracted from the Linux Credits files and discusses methodological challenges of automatic extraction of research data from open source files. The extracted data is used to describe the geographical expansion of the core Linux developer community. The paper also comments on attempts to use the Linux Credits data to derive policy recommendations for open source software.

It includes a section responding to Brown's paper:

[Microsoft/AdTI] claimed that the future of open source software and Linux is therefore threatened by the problem of assigning authorship to specific pieces of code, and potential legal costs resulting from this. As the argument to an important extent has been based on the data presented in this paper, a few observations may be useful. [...]

Based on common knowledge about software development, it therefore appears that a single computer enthusiast could well have created the first Linux version in a couple of months. In fact, by reading the original source code, it is quite clear that a single author, still in the early phases of learning to program operating systems, has produced it. [...]

The difficulty to accurately allocate credit in software development projects should not, however, be automatically interpreted as evidence of misallocated credit or intellectual property rights infringements, as the Tocqueville report, for example, has done. Software products are often based on incremental innovation where existing technologies and knowledge are recombined to create new functionality. [...] [D]evelopers may deserve much more credit than there is intellectual property available today. One way to deal with this issue is to create explicit representations of moral authorship that are only loosely connected with current concepts of intellectual property. The Linux Credits file is an example of such an approach.

It is clear from the paper that Tuomi has a good understanding of how credit for contributions is recorded, and he proposes some quite interesting ideas about how ideas actually propagate as compared to how formal IP law works. I rather get the impression in reading the response to Brown that Tuomi does not like his serious research being twisted and misconstrued. (Who would?)

Should you require further evidence that none of Brown's sources support his conclusions, read section 6.

Groklaw has further coverage.

posted Thu 10 Jun 2004 in /issues/adti | link

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