During last Collaboration summit of the Linux Foundation in San Francisco, Bradley M. Kuhn and Karen M. Sandler made a very interesting talk about “Lessons learned from ath5k” at Software freedom law center. They explained how they had to solve a copyright and licensing issue between linux and openBSD development teams.
During the presentation, Bradley made a comment about “GIT” the version control system used by the linux foundation. He underlined the difficulties they had to track and analyse developers contributions. One must agree that the hierarchical hash system used by GIT, does not ease tracking of minor contribution. From this point of view, CVS and SVN, based on “diff” at the file granularity, are much easier to use. One can wonder if GIT is just another tool developed by developers for developers use only, without out consideration for IP issues. Answer, is definitely NO, since GIT for instance allow to registered both the COMMITER and the AUTHOR of each changeset. The choice of a given version control system instead of another one, can make intellectual property ownership tracking easier. But during our previous survey, we have found lot of differences between development teams' habit, inducing sometime bigger issue in term of IP ownership tracking ...
Links :
Survey over the major open source version control systems including git vs svn comparison
Paper on “Code Analysis of the Linux Wireless Team’s ath5k Driver” in ressources from the software freedom law center