Code submitters are going to have to sign a so-called Developer's Certificate of Origin (DCO) affirming that they wrote the code they're tossing into the pot - either in whole or in part - and that they have a right to submit it under an appropriate open source license.

The OSDL's announcement first thing Monday morning made much of the move ensuring that developers get proper credit for their contributions and OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen told us that it had "nothing" to do with SCO, which when we repeated that remark to SCO sent SCO back on its haunches to brace itself while it had a rollicking good laugh.

According to SCO spokesman Blake Stowell, "If there weren't IP issues in Linux today, they wouldn't be doing this."

Cohen indicated the DCO was developed in response to "big business and government" concerns as well as the consortium's advisor council, but characterized it as a coming-of-age for Linux, putting it on a par, he said, with "similar documentation found in proprietary operating systems and applications."

Linus had no problem drawing a straight line between this new DCO thing and SCO, which for the purpose he dubbed the "Smoking Crack Organization."

Anyway, Cohen also acknowledged that Linux has been the work of a tight little group of people known personally to Linus - probably no more than 150 people - not the thousands as painted in the popular press - but that as Linux becomes more and more mainstream, he said, that little group is going to get more elastic and anonymous.

The DCO covers derivative work as well as contributors who get submissions from third parties and pass them, unchanged, up the kernel tree. The fact that code comes from a third party will have to be acknowledged.

Cohen said the contributions would be documented inside the operating system code but only going forward, not back in time. Undocumented code will apparently not be considered for inclusion.

Linus claimed, "We've always had transparency, peer review, pride and personal responsibility." That, however, he forgets, didn't stop copyrights from being stripped off code before it was sucked up into Linux.

In a canned statement, Cohen said, "The Linux development process has worked well for more than 10 years but with its success has come new challenges. The measure we announce today goes a long way toward eliminating doubt surrounding the origin of Linux code and does so without placing any undue burden on the development community."

OSDL is supposed to review kernel submissions for DCO compliance and says it will begin educating developers and users on the DCO.

See www.osdl.org/newsroom/press_releases/2004/2004_05_24_dco.html for the DCO's exact wording.

• Linus Torvalds: How the Kernel Group Can Prevent "SCO II" From Ever Happening
• Linux Kernel Submission Process Revised and Tightened
• What About the Linux End Users?