[cap-talk] Any hope in RSA 2008?

[Rob Meijer]

On Fri, April 4, 2008 16:39, David Wagner wrote:
> Folks on the Linux kernel mailing list seem to have a saying for
> when someone says "Wouldn't it be nice if the kernel had feature X?"
> (when that someone seems to be implicitly expecting someone else to
> implement feature X for them).  The response is: "Send code."  The
> implication being that, of course, code is often a lot more useful
> than gripes.  And for those who aren't willing or able to write code
> or to provide resources (money) to enable others to write code, well,
> maybe they shouldn't complain too much.

However much I agree with that, the linux kernel development community,
especially the majority of the influential part of the LSM crowd (with the
exception of the AppArmor people) also are about the most hostile crowd
with respect to accepting improvements and patches that even partially
smell like providing discretionary based stuff. This basicaly seems to
mean that if you seriously want to provide usefully code, not only will
you need to create it, but you will have to maintain it largely outside of
the kernel main development tree, with the main tree as a moving target.
"Send code" sounds reasonable, but I think in practice the barrier for
getting this code accepted would make the idea much less reasonable than
it sounds at first.