> However their own ways of doing things appear to be illegal in regard to copyright, and if so they need to change.
I think they're doing things as 'by the book' as possible.
> Of course I don't know if the interaction was as OP claims or not.
Well, he documented it twice and those two accounts differ considerably.
> I'm not really interested in digging into it more. Unless I'm on a jury I won't (and a jury is not allowed to dig into it - but that is a different discussion)
Who will the OP sue?
For what exactly?
In which court?
None of this makes any sense. If you think the possible outcome of submitting an unsolicited small and broken patch to a security mailing list of a major FOSS project is going to result in you taking anybody to court for copyright infringement then it probably is a great idea not to contribute at all, this will save everybody time and grief. Besides that: the OP - as far as I'm concerned - has copyright to their contribution to LKML, note that nobody except for the OP claims that this is not the case.
It's interesting how for instance all of the comments written in this forum are technically copyrighted by their writers. But you don't control them after submitting them because of the way the forum is structured, the jurisdiction that it is run from and the expectations that come with forum comments. LKML patch submissions are like that as well: they come with a whole pile of baked in assumptions that the OP apparently wasn't familiar with. The idea that each and every minor patch author, especially of patches that are broken and that do not contain required elements is going to end up being hand-held through the process of making a proper contribution is ridiculous.
The maintainers work-load is such that the pay-off is that your contribution is looked at at all, better still if it results in a fix (even if it isn't literally yours). And if you want credit then you should at least state that up front so that the maintainer has a chance to work with you out of the spotlight until you're ready to submit your patch publicly.
Threatening to sue on account of something like this is exactly why I would never be the maintainer of a major open source project, life is too short to deal with all the drama and entitlement.
I think they're doing things as 'by the book' as possible.
> Of course I don't know if the interaction was as OP claims or not.
Well, he documented it twice and those two accounts differ considerably.
> I'm not really interested in digging into it more. Unless I'm on a jury I won't (and a jury is not allowed to dig into it - but that is a different discussion)
Who will the OP sue?
For what exactly?
In which court?
None of this makes any sense. If you think the possible outcome of submitting an unsolicited small and broken patch to a security mailing list of a major FOSS project is going to result in you taking anybody to court for copyright infringement then it probably is a great idea not to contribute at all, this will save everybody time and grief. Besides that: the OP - as far as I'm concerned - has copyright to their contribution to LKML, note that nobody except for the OP claims that this is not the case.
It's interesting how for instance all of the comments written in this forum are technically copyrighted by their writers. But you don't control them after submitting them because of the way the forum is structured, the jurisdiction that it is run from and the expectations that come with forum comments. LKML patch submissions are like that as well: they come with a whole pile of baked in assumptions that the OP apparently wasn't familiar with. The idea that each and every minor patch author, especially of patches that are broken and that do not contain required elements is going to end up being hand-held through the process of making a proper contribution is ridiculous.
The maintainers work-load is such that the pay-off is that your contribution is looked at at all, better still if it results in a fix (even if it isn't literally yours). And if you want credit then you should at least state that up front so that the maintainer has a chance to work with you out of the spotlight until you're ready to submit your patch publicly.
Threatening to sue on account of something like this is exactly why I would never be the maintainer of a major open source project, life is too short to deal with all the drama and entitlement.