Dear Stephen Warren,
In message 571E733A.1060208@wwwdotorg.org you wrote:
On 04/24/2016 04:20 AM, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Stephen,
In message 1461099580-3866-3-git-send-email-swarren@wwwdotorg.org you wrote:
/*
- Copyright 2011-2016 NVIDIA Corporation
- (C) Copyright 2009 SAMSUNG Electronics
- Minkyu Kang mk7.kang@samsung.com
- Jaehoon Chung jh80.chung@samsung.com
*/
- Portions Copyright 2011-2015 NVIDIA Corporation
- SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
Both the change of the position of the copyright note and the rewording contain a subtle but still significant change of meaning.
Now it seems as if Nvidia was the major copyright holder. Is this intentional?
I was not aware that the order actually implied anything. I would imagine the copyright dates and "git blame" output were more relevant since they pin-point specific changes, whereas copyright headers don't have the detail to convey the whole picture.
Well, just read the text before and after the patch, and let the meaning sink in...
In this case, both "git log" and "git blame" certainly show that NVIDIA is the primary author of this code. I deliberately removed "Portions" because it was something uncommon and seems inaccurate. I don't recall why I changed the order; probably because I was editing a lot of files and just happened to paste the message there. I imagine the Samsung copyright notice is only there because the general structure of the file (set of functions implemented) was based on an existing driver, rather than because any of the non-boilerplate code was written by them.
I did not check this, and I don't intend to do so. you may actually be right, and your modification may be perfectly OK.
But from just reading the patch, it leaves a stale aftertaste.
Unfortunately we've (NVIDIA at least) been a little lax making sure the NVIDIA copyright messages are kept up-to-date when editing files, hence why this series had to change a lot of them for the first time recently. If we went back and re-wrote all of git history paying strict attention to the copyright notice dates and formatting, I imagine the set of copyright-related changes in this series would be much smaller.
It is difficult for any outside party to verify this. I feel such changes require a lot of tact, and global edits are probably not a good idea. You know that I don't post very often lately, so you can imagine that this must have stirred me a bit.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk