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In an email sent to the Kernel Mailing List he has asked for a discussion to implement 'a process to explicitly document not only where a patch comes from ... but the path it came through.'

He said 'signing off' patches would help 'show people who don't understand the open source process' how it works. It would also avoid the pain of hunting through the mailing list archives of yore to prove the authenticity of code should another SCO-like event arise in the future by making such documentation explicit and available.

In the SCO case, he said on some instances,

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it was only the errors in the code that proved it was original. 'In the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to document the origin of the code.'

The move mirrors changes at the Free Software Foundation - the organisation behind GNU - which says it has 'just begun a project here at FSF to document and codify our process, so that it can be disseminated in the form of a policy manual and accompanying software, to all other Free Software projects who wish to solidify their legal assembly process.'

It claims that its past emphasis on the legal assembly of its software helped it out from under SCO's gaze, leaving Linux in its legal searchlight. 'The SCO fiasco has shown the community the resilience and complete certainty that a good legal assembly process can create. (SCO, after all, eventually dropped their claims against GNU as a whole and focused on the Linux project which, for all its wonderful technical achievements, has a rather loose legal assembly process.)'