[U-Boot] [PATCH 13/60] ARM: tegra: sort some board file include directives

Stephen Warren
2016-04-26T20:44:24Z

On 04/26/2016 12:15 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 10:18:06AM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
>> On 04/25/2016 05:22 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
>> ...
>>> I know company lawyers come up with various policies and some are more
>>> restrictive than others. Anything about the exact guidelines you can
>>> share would be appreciated.
>>
>> They're simple and I would assume quite standard:
>>
>> 1) When creating a new file, add an NVIDIA copyright header.
>>
>> 2) When performing a non-trival edit to an existing file, if it has
>> an existing NVIDIA copyright header, update the data, and if not,
>> add one.
>>
>> Guidance on "non-trivial" isn't given. I would take it to mean
>> anything other than typos and whitespace fixes.
>>
>> Re-ordering your email slightly:
>>> I want to echo my agreement on this point. Re-ordering includes does
>>> not rise to the level of adding copyright/author/etc lines.
>>
>> I can see your argument re: copyright headers in the individual
>> files, although again I'd echo my previous comments re: a simple and
>> unambiguous process being preferable.
>
> Here's where I hope I don't get everyone at NVIDIA that's doing Linux
> Kernel or other F/OSS work in trouble. Point #1 above is quite
> understandable. Point #2 is something I can see but has totally not
> been done by the folks doing Linux Kernel work.

Admittedly compliance is spotty; the last thing someone wants to do when
having completed a patch is think about all kinds of nit-picks like
updating copyrights, checkpatch, testing, even compiling:-)

However, it's certainly not unheard of. Here are a few examples I was
able to spot quickly:

NVIDIA:
af6313d61a78 (Alex Courbot)
08acae34e8da (Paul Walsmley)
891846516317 (Thierry Reding)
783c8f4c8445 (Peter De Schrijver)
0ffdd4b61b13 (Stephen Warren)

Red Hat
1363074667a6 (Hans De Goede)
25462f7f5295 (Wei Huang)
54cea3f6681a (Milan Broz)

Texas Instruments
2f67864b6d5b (Andrew F. Davis)
0d6fa53fd805 (Andy Gross)

Denx
88eeb72ec4c1 (Stefan Roese)

Admittedly those don't look like refactoring changes, but it sounded to
me like you were arguing completely against point (2) in my original
email above. That's not reasonable. Arguing against (2) for simple
refactoring could be.

> The review on this patch series itself has indeed been derailed, which I
> do not like either. With respect to copyright on individual changes and
> so forth, is this a concern you have, or a concern the lawyers at NVIDIA
> have?

The lawyers have dictated the process which I should follow. I often
forget, so I made sure that for such a large series I'd follow the
process correctly this time. To be honest, I'm way beyond care about
anything to do with copyright at this point; I'd rather just work on
something where it wasn't an issue in any form at all.