chown problem

[Jens Röder]

Hello,

while explaining yesterday someone the sense of the right system of unix
with owner, group, others, and the commands ln, chmod and chown, I run
into the following problem:

From HP-UX unix system I am used to, that I can donate a file to another
user. That file is then out of my control of course. That makes sense,
when I want to share a file with someone privately and both can work on
it. I link it hard and give the "copy" away.

When I call chown as normal user, I get the error message that this
operation is not allowed. It only works as user root.

I think that chown is not working correctly. It should be that way, that
user root can change the owner ships of files with out limitation as it is
now and users should be able to give files to others away only.

Suggestions I got from the news group people to use the s-bit are not
acceptable due to security reasons.

Thanks and let me know what you think.

JR

-- 
Jens Röder, Braunschweig