Gentoo Linux copyright CDDL question

Question to the nice folks in g.m.d.......

I have a couple of nice patches I would like to contribute to the Gentoo project, but I have some doubts. As some people probably already know, Gentoo requires that their contributors transfer copyright of all contributed material to the Gentoo Foundation, as described here:

However, some pbuttages in this document seem very suspicious to my untrained, non-lawyer, eyes. Could any of the helpful folks in g.m.d please take a look and pick it apart. My questions in particular.....

(1) Why would they need copyright for patches for programs they're just packaging, but didn't write themselves? (FAQ item #3) The problem I see here once a patch for any 3rd party application is submitted to bugs.gentoo.org, Gentoo owns copyright and the original contributor loses all rights over their code, including the possibility to use it in their own, potentially differently- licensed projects. Is it advisable to submit any non-trivial patches to Gentoo's bug tracker?

(2) It says there legal action is only possible if all copyright is owned by a single enbreasty. Isn't it rather true that any of the copyright holders can take legal action should the need arise?

(3) They are using the term "Intellectual Property." Isn't that term generally frowned upon in the Free Software world?

(4) In other places they claim they're doing this because GNU, Debian, and the BSDs are requiring copyright transfer as well 1. Well I know that some GNU projects recommend it (emacs, libstdc++), but by far not all; and I have heard first hand that Debian not only does not require it, but they don't even have an enbreasty one could buttign copyright to even if one wanted to. (Does anyone know about the BSDs?)

Also, it has come to my attention that some of the work contributed to Gentoo is grossly missattributed; the most recent incident being dealt with in

Here, the writer of said guide (C.M.) complained back in May on a Gentoo mailing list that a different guy (who didn't write a single word in said document) is listed as the main writer while the real writer is only listed as contributor. After nothing happened in more than four months, the real writer got rediculed as being destructive to the Gentoo community as a whole--just for insisting on his copyright. Later on they did give credit--but somewhere in a footnote in an appendix, and hoped they would get away with it.

There is also another (unfortunately anonymous) guy who claims he knows about tons of other such violations, but did only disclose two so far. Both cases involve patches submitted to bugs.gentoo.org by 3rd parties that got submitted up stream-- misattributed to Gentoo in the first case and misattributed to a Gentoo maintainer who did not write it in the other one. Read more about it here

I checked both and it seems the guy's right. He says he'll reveal more "when the time is right."

So here's my question: under these circumstances, how advisable is it to submit any patches to bugs.gentoo.org? We do have some fixes for two really longstanding bugs, but feel very uncomfortable about submitting them to Gentoo, even if it's against the spirit of Free Software and all. What do the experts here think?

On a related subject, we have developed a kernel mode driver for our Microsoft Wireless Optical Mice with Tilt Wheel Technology, complete with device file indev and all needed ioctls necessary for querying signal strength, battery life status, and other misc. statistics, for Linux, that we have now ported to the OpenSolaris kernel (hence the xpost to c.u.s). My question is, is the same type of copyright transfer needed to get this driver into OpenSolaris proper? How would we handle code shared between the Linux and OpenSolaris driver?

Thanks,

-- Mike Cox (therealmikecox)