On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 02:44:24PM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
On 04/26/2016 12:15 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 10:18:06AM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
On 04/25/2016 05:22 PM, Tom Rini wrote: ...
I know company lawyers come up with various policies and some are more restrictive than others. Anything about the exact guidelines you can share would be appreciated.
They're simple and I would assume quite standard:
When creating a new file, add an NVIDIA copyright header.
When performing a non-trival edit to an existing file, if it has
an existing NVIDIA copyright header, update the data, and if not, add one.
Guidance on "non-trivial" isn't given. I would take it to mean anything other than typos and whitespace fixes.
Re-ordering your email slightly:
I want to echo my agreement on this point. Re-ordering includes does not rise to the level of adding copyright/author/etc lines.
I can see your argument re: copyright headers in the individual files, although again I'd echo my previous comments re: a simple and unambiguous process being preferable.
Here's where I hope I don't get everyone at NVIDIA that's doing Linux Kernel or other F/OSS work in trouble. Point #1 above is quite understandable. Point #2 is something I can see but has totally not been done by the folks doing Linux Kernel work.
Admittedly compliance is spotty; the last thing someone wants to do when having completed a patch is think about all kinds of nit-picks like updating copyrights, checkpatch, testing, even compiling:-)
However, it's certainly not unheard of. Here are a few examples I was able to spot quickly:
NVIDIA: af6313d61a78 (Alex Courbot) 08acae34e8da (Paul Walsmley) 891846516317 (Thierry Reding) 783c8f4c8445 (Peter De Schrijver) 0ffdd4b61b13 (Stephen Warren)
Red Hat 1363074667a6 (Hans De Goede) 25462f7f5295 (Wei Huang) 54cea3f6681a (Milan Broz)
Texas Instruments 2f67864b6d5b (Andrew F. Davis) 0d6fa53fd805 (Andy Gross)
Denx 88eeb72ec4c1 (Stefan Roese)
Admittedly those don't look like refactoring changes, but it sounded to me like you were arguing completely against point (2) in my original email above. That's not reasonable. Arguing against (2) for simple refactoring could be.
I'm arguing in favour of what all of those commits did, extending existing copyright notices. I'm fine with that. To be clear, in _this_ patch what I object to is adding the NVIDIA copyright line to board/avionic-design/common/tamonten-ng.c and I am fine with extending it on all of the board/nvidia/ files and now wondering you didn't add it to board/toradex/.
The review on this patch series itself has indeed been derailed, which I do not like either. With respect to copyright on individual changes and so forth, is this a concern you have, or a concern the lawyers at NVIDIA have?
The lawyers have dictated the process which I should follow. I often forget, so I made sure that for such a large series I'd follow the process correctly this time. To be honest, I'm way beyond care about anything to do with copyright at this point; I'd rather just work on something where it wasn't an issue in any form at all.
Indeed :(