On Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 09:40:52AM -0700, Dave Hansen wrote: > On 10/5/20 8:02 AM, Greg KH wrote: > > On Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 05:23:45PM +0300, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote: > >> [*] One thing I've been wondering for a long time is that, why new code > >> should have the copyright platters in the first place? I get it for > >> pre-Git era but now there is a cryptographic log of authority. > > Go talk to your corporate lawyers about this, it is one of the most > > common cargo-cult patterns around :) > > For this patch, though, it seems like we should just update the dates > instead of removing them. Already done. I updated them yesterday as: Copyright(c) 2016-20 Intel Corporation. Changing from '//' to '/* ... */' is not yet. > If I look at the last 1000 "^+.*Copyright" lines added to the kernel, > 997 of them have a year. So, weird or not, it's a pretty standard > convention. We'd need a slightly more broad conversation before we > decide to nix these dates. > > Pure speculation: Copyright protection, at least in the US, is not > forever. I _think_ it's 75 years or something. That protection starts > when the work is created and is independent of when it gets merged into > Linux. So, if we did something weird like merge a driver written 10 > years ago, it would only be protected for 65 more years after we merge > it. In other words, git history _might_ be irrelevant for copyright > protection. /Jarkko
