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Comment by invaliduser | Hacker News Reader

How is creating trust issues on a kernel not an actual damage?

Actual Damages is generally a legal term in which someone has to point to an actual dollar value of the damages they suffered. i.e John ran into my car, here is an estimate for $1,000 to repair the damages.

Trust is very hard to make an actual damages claim for, it can be done but outside of the Linux Foundation I am not sure what companies would have an actual damages claim

Actual Damages would be the time & effort to review previous patches for vulnerabilities, which is also the motivation for their demands from UMN. That's complicated by the fact that it's unpaid volunteer work, but a bill for the man-hours to evaluate the extent of the mess and clean it up seems like a clear-cut basis for establishing damages.

Hopefully, the Linux Foundation or someone with standing sends the university a bill - if they don't have intrinsic motivation to behave ethically, then the force of the market is a powerful motivation.

I have spent time doing contract development, and also made volunteer contributions to open source projects (not the Linux kernal, though). Certainly, if I were pulled into reviewing UMN kernel patches, I would be tracking my hours at my standard hourly rate, so that I would have the documentation for a claim for actual damages. Cleaning up other people's bad-faith crap is not what open source developers volunteer for. UMN caused real work for real people for bad-faith reasons, and should pay up. The work they caused is deflecting volunteers from otherwise productive activities.

I suspect many volunteer kernel developers do contract development to pay the bills -- it should not be hard for them to just create a billing code for UMN clean-up. The Linux foundation can aggregate them all and dump that on UMN.

(Also, I have a MSEE from UMN, and I can tell you that the next attempt at fund raising from me is not going to go well for them.)

Hypothetically let's say that is damage that they can be held liable for.

How far does it extend? The patches would have been reviewed and approved by someone at the linux foundation. Are they complicit and liable? Same goes for the person that merged the code. I don't think that's a door I want to open.

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