On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 09:00:29PM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote: > On 03/27/2013 10:40 AM, Lubomir Rintel wrote: > > This adds a driver for watchdog timer hardware present on Broadcom BCM2835 SoC, > > used in Raspberry Pi and Roku 2 devices. > > > > Signed-off-by: Lubomir Rintel <lkundrak@xxxxx> > > Signed-off-by: Dom Cobley <popcornmix@xxxxxxxxx> > > Those two s-o-b lines should be swapped, since if Dom did sign off on > any part of this patch, he did it before you did. > > That said... > > I wonder if it's actually appropriate to include Dom's s-o-b here, since > I don't think he really wrote this patch itself. I think you mentioned > that you hadn't use much of the downstream driver except for some defines? > > To be clear, I mentioned the existence of the S-o-b line downstream > simply to demonstrate that the commits you were getting information from > had correctly followed the process described in > Documentation/SubmittingPatches, and so it was OK to use that > information while creating a GPL'd driver. > > So there are a couple of ways that this patch could have been created: > > 1) You took the downstream commit itself, cherry-picked it into the > upstream kernel, modified it to suit upstream, and then submitted that. > The modifications might be extensive, such as renaming the file, > removing parts of the code that the upstream watchdog core now handles, > adding some new features, fixing bugs, cleanup, etc.; whatever is needed > to upstream the patch. > > In this case, I believe it would be appropriate to maintain any S-o-b > lines from the original downstream commit, and add yours. But, I believe > you should also (a) maintain the git author field from the original > downstream commit (b) include a list of the changes you made to the > patch in the commit description, so you can be blamed for them rather > than the original author:-) > > 2) You read the downstream commit for information, but created a > completely new driver for the upstream kernel, using the downstream > driver just as a reference. In this case, I believe it's fine for the > git author field to be you, and for the only s-o-b line present to be > yours, since you really did write the patch from scratch. However, you > should credit the downstream work in the (c) header and/or commit > description. > > This current patch sees to be a slight hybrid of both approaches (you're > listed as the git author, but have included Dom's s-o-b line on a patch > I don't think he created, and wasn't directly derived from one he created). > > I'm not sure if I'm being too picky. I guess I'll leave it up to Wim Van > Sebroeck, since he's the watchdog maintainer and would be the person who > applies this patch. > I wondered about the same. I think 2) would be more appropriate. My approach would have been to reference previous work in the file header, something along the line of "derived from xxx", and add a copyright statement from the original work if there was one - pretty much what you propose above. Guenter -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-watchdog" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
