Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH 8/8] vmstate: Add copyright info for sparc processor

[Juan Quintela <quintela@redhat.com>]

Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 15:44, Juan Quintela <quintela@redhat.com> wrote:
>> v2: Move license to BSD-like as in vl.c
>
> This does not belong to the commit message.
>
>> Signed-off-by: Juan Quintela <quintela@redhat.com>
>> ---
>>  target-sparc/vmstate-cpu.c |   29 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>>  1 files changed, 29 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>>
>> diff --git a/target-sparc/vmstate-cpu.c b/target-sparc/vmstate-cpu.c
>> index 259db19..c74ea9a 100644
>> --- a/target-sparc/vmstate-cpu.c
>> +++ b/target-sparc/vmstate-cpu.c
>> @@ -1,3 +1,32 @@
>> +/*
>> + * Migration support for sparc cpu
>> + *
>> + * Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard
>> + * Copyright (c) 2003-2011 Blue Swirl <blauwirbel@gmail.com>
>
> I'd use 2004 here.
>
>> + * Copyright (c) 2011 Red Hat, Inc.
>
> The above list is by no means exhaustive, at least Richard Henderson,
> Igor Kovalenko and Anthony Liguori are also listed in git log for
> target-sparc/machine.c. Again, either drop the copyright stuff or use
> real facts. Is this even useful?

Anthony asked me to put copyright notes on the files.  It is supposed
that every file should have a copyright notice.

As stated on the 0/8 patch, I am not happy with either:
- Assigning copyright only to me (although I changed almost every line
  of the files, almost all changes are kind of automatic)
- Put copyright notices for other people, as I have no clue about what
  name/company/years to put there.  Notice that for contributors that
  only do small changes, normally they don't care.

Add to this that:
- Anthony want every file to have a copyright notice.

This is the reason that I started with:
- Add myself as a copyright owner
- Put the original authors as: Based on previous work from: John Smith.

That makes everybody "kind of happy" (as in the film: the less of all
evils).  As you can see, everybody except yourself gave his "Acked-by".
I thought that this change was what you had in mind.  I would include
whatever text that you told me that you want to include instead.

First of all, notice that I am not a lawyer.  My understanding of
Anthony request, is that every file has to had a copyright notice.  But
not everybody that has contributed to the file has to add its copyright
(notice for example that vl.c only has a copyright notice from Fabrice,
when a lot of people has contributed to that file).

The problem here is that we are adding the copyrights after the file
exist, and then we don't have the "initial" copyright notice, that
anyone can add his/her name to it (if that is his/her wish).

Anthony also wanted this process to be very public for obvious reasons
and that everybody that has stakes on this could make any comment they
want.

If the problem is that my name is on there, just let me know and I would
remove it (the only reason that I put mine there is that I am more
comfortable adding mine that the name of anyone else, but if "anyone
else" appears and says that copyright is their, I would just include his
notice and let that alone).

I hope that I had made the reasons clear of this exercise.

Later, Juan.