What Linus Could Teach Congress

What Congress set out to do, was to come up with ethics reform
legislation that would show that they are addressing the concerns of
the public, in the wake of numerous scandals.  Reportedly,
though, both parties were reluctant to put limits or their interactions
with lobbyists.  Instead, they are going to settle for a
rather anemic rule change that requires lawmakers to acknowledge the
pork-barrel earmarks they sponsor.

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401674.html">

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401674.html">House
Votes To Disclose Earmarks

href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401674.html">Rule
Change Defers Broad Lobby Reform

By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A01



The House voted yesterday to shed more light on narrow-interest tax and
spending legislation called earmarks, an incremental step toward
openness that ended the prospect for a more sweeping overhaul of
federal lobbying laws this year.



With a 245 to 171 vote, the House reacted to a year of congressional
scandals by requiring its members to own up to the thousands of
earmarks they sponsor each year.



Earmarks have been at the center of corruption investigations involving
several lawmakers and lobbyists, and a public outcry against them
helped spur a high-priority effort this year to devise ethics
legislation that would have restricted contacts between lobbyists and
members of Congress.



Instead, the House simply changed its internal rules to require that
these targeted programs and their sponsors be disclosed in every type
of bill, a procedure that does not currently exist. The measure, like
any such rule change, could expire at the end of the year, but it is
likely to be re-adopted along with the House's many other rules,
Republican leaders said.

That is a small step in the right direction.
 It is a mere token, however, because it usually is pretty
easy to figure out who benefits from earmarks.  So the
disclosures probably will tell us only things that we could have
figured out anyway.



They have a much bigger problem with nondisclosure, which is not
addressed at all.  Often, it is hard to know who actually
authored each provision in a big bill.  The documents are
huge, and go through several drafts.  I've read allegations
that things are sometimes added at the last minute, then voted on
without any of the lawmakers even knowing that something was added.



Apparently, Congress has no version control, no system for managing
concurrent versions, and no systematic way of keeping track of who
wrote what, or when or why certain provisions were added.



I suppose that it seems as though it would be too complicated and
expensive to keep track of all those edits.



Guess what...

The standard "vanilla" Linux kernel consists of over 3.6 million lines
of code.  Thousands of persons have contributed over a period
of many years.  Often, there are many different versions
floating around at the same time.  And many of the
contributors are volunteers, from all over the  world.



Guess what?  Due to some moldering and (and probably
nonmeritorious) href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_v._IBM_Linux_lawsuit">lawsuits
from the SCO corporation, it is essential that the writers and users of
Linux be able to show where all those lines of code came from.
 They have to be able to prove that there are no infractions
of intellectual property law.  



Guess what?  The maintainers and developers of the Linux
kernel have explicit documentation of who wrote all 3.6 million lines
of code. In fact, there is a href="http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050529095918381">public
review process for all proposed changes:

...
And, ultimately, *all* patches which go into Linus's tree are
simultaneously sent to the `commits' mailing list for all interested
parties to review. All patches on the commits list have the full
attribution trail so we can see who was involved. Because of the
commits
list it is simply not possible for anyone to slip a patch into the
kernel
without a heck of a lot of developers knowing about it....



...All Linux kernel development is done by sending patches though
publicly posted email. If you take a look at the main Linux kernel
development mailing list, you will see hundreds of these patches being
sent around, discussed, critiqued, and even accepted, into the main
kernel tree. This is how kernel development is done...

This is done entirely by a grass-roots process.  It is not
difficult.  Well, it can be difficult to actually write
lines of program code that are useful and don't break anything.
 But it is not difficult to keep track of
who wrote what, and who is responsible for putting the revisions into
the final product.  We already have the software to do it.
  The software doesn't cost anything.  



Really, it would be simple to implement this in practice.  All
they would have to do, is put up a public email site.  All
proposed legislation and all proposed changes would have to be emailed
to the list.  Anyone in the world could log on at any time and
wee what has been proposed.  All emails would have to be
digitally signed.  The sender of the email would have to take
full responsibility for the signed contents.  If a final bill
is later found to contain something that did not go through the public
review process, it would not be considered to be a valid part of the
law.  And if something did end up in there that was not
supposed to be there, whoever put it there would go to prison.
 



What this means is simple: if there is anything about the process of
writing legislation that is not 100% transparent, it is because someone
has something to hide.  It's just plain ridiculous for
Congress to tell us that their new level of transparency is some kind
of reform.  It is not.  It just means that they are
being a little less criminal than usual.