On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 12:31 PM, Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 6:52 PM, Omar Ramirez Luna <omar.ramirez@xxxxxx> wrote: >> at that point *you* wanted your patches not to be >> included if the last one wasn't merged in. > > Not without the copyright update patch. ... > So. Would you care to give a reason why my contributions don't deserve > a copyright? Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I speak only for myself in this post, and doesn't represent TI in anyway. AFAICT, you get copyright for every kernel change you submit and is accepted. Even if you just contribute whitespace cleanups, you get the copyright to those cleanups (not to suggest this was the sole contribution here). The copyright assignment is per the actual git commit itself, obviously, and it doesn't apply for the rest of the code in those files you edited. There are some exceptions, but they are not applicable here: - Usually when you get paid for the work, the employer keeps the copyright of the patch, not the author. - There are some projects where you have to relinquish the copyright in order for the patch to be accepted. This is how FSF (Free Software Foundation) projects work (e.g. gcc), but not the Linux kernel (which is not a FSF project). As I mentioned, I don't think these exceptions apply in this case, and AFAICT, Felipe - you inherently get the copyright for the changes that your accepted patches introduce. So it all boils down to the semantic question whether to edit the header file, adding new copyright lines, or not. Felipe, I think your contributions are important and helpful, and I would personally be happy if you continue to do them. I personally don't think that adding an explicit copyright line to the header should be important, because you get your copyright anyway. The exact change, to which you get copyright on, is kept in the git history, and will not likely to go away. I think this is pretty satisfying, and as a result, you don't see people(/companies) changing copyright headers when they submit kernel patches that edit existing files. The only thing I am not sure about, and that may be a concern to TI, is whether adding a copyright line in the header might actually give copyright ownership for the complete file. If this is true, I can understand why TI might not be so keen in adding copyright owners to the file header, without explicitly specifying what is the copyright about (not to suggest any opinion of TI on the matter, I speak only for myself). Again: I am not a lawyer, and I speak only for myself in this post, and doesn't represent TI in anyway. Thanks, Ohad. > > -- > Felipe Contreras > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
