Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 22 May 2005 19:44:38 +0100 | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: When we detect that a 16550 was in fact part of a NatSemi SuperIO chip |
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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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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