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SubjectRe: When we detect that a 16550 was in fact part of a NatSemi SuperIO chip
On Sun, May 22, 2005 at 08:14:06PM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-05-22 at 09:59 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, 22 May 2005, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > >
> > > Linus, please do not apply patches from me which have my personal
> > > information mangled or removed.
> >
> > I've asked Russell not to do it, but the fact is, he's worried about legal
> > issues, and while I've also tried to resolve those (by having the OSDL
> > lawyer try to contact some lawyers in the UK), that hasn't been clarified
> > yet.
>
> there is a potential nasty interaction with the UK moral rights thing
> where an author can demand that his authorship claim remains intact...
> so if David objects to his authorship being mangled (and partially
> removed) he may have a strong legal position to do so.

Actually, that only depends on whether you decide that Signed-off-by:
reflects authorship. There's evidence to say that it may not:

1. There can be multiple Signed-off-by: lines in a patch - many of whom
are not authors of the code.

2. The first Signed-off-by: line may not be the author of the code if
the author has not added that himself. It may be a subsystem
maintainers.

If you don't believe either of those, I suggest you re-read the original
discussions about Signed-off-by: and refresh your memory that, in fact,
all Signed-off-by: is saying is that _someone_ accepts responsibility
for submitting the patch.

If you still don't accept that, here's the actual text in
SubmittingPatches - maybe it's wrong?

| The sign-off is a simple line at the end of the explanation for the
| patch, which certifies that you wrote it or otherwise have the right to
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
| pass it on as a open-source patch.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Let's look at it another way. Signed-off-by: is a mark of attributation
and authorship. If someone were to receive an un-signedoff patch but
had the right to pass it on as an open-source patch, according to your
position it would be wrong to add a "Signed-off-by:" line, because that's
like falsely claiming your the author of the code. And what about all
the other Signed-off-by: lines which are subsequently added by Andrew
and Linus? Aren't they falsely claiming authorship as well?

Therefore, claiming that Signed-off-by: is a mark of attributation
or authorship is obviously nonsense.

--
Russell King
Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/
maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core
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