[PATCH 0/7] Nexus One Support

[David Woodhouse]

On Sat, 2011-01-22 at 11:22 -0800, Brian Swetland wrote:
> 
> What would be useful would be a reasonable convention for
> acknowledging multiple authors, perhaps something along the lines of:
> 
> Author: Awesome Upstreamer <au at example.com>  or  Main Author <main at example.com>
> Committer: Awesome Upstreamer <au at example.com>
> Subject: arm: msm8k: acpu clock management
> 
> ... summary of the patch ...
> 
> Original-Author: Joe Firmware Guy <joe at oem.com>
> Original-Author: Kernel Droid <droid at android.com>
> Signed-off-by: ... 

Nah, sod that. If the original authors couldn't be bothered to do their
work properly in the first place so that it was upstreamable, then as
far as I'm concerned they don't deserve the credit.

We should do the bare minimum that's required by copyright law, which is
making sure that the code is permitted in the kernel under the GPL.

Since the GPL doesn't have, and doesn't *allow*, a clause like the BSD
advertising clause, we have no requirement to credit the original
authors.

If they wanted credit, they should have done the job right in the first
place. Or at least finished the job for themselves rather than forcing
someone else to clean up their mess.

-- 
David Woodhouse                            Open Source Technology Centre
David.Woodhouse at intel.com                              Intel Corporation