Re: [PATCH RESEND v6 6/8] mfd: hi6421-spmi-pmic: move driver from staging

[Lee Jones <lee.jones@linaro.org>]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2021, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:

> Em Thu, 24 Jun 2021 16:26:00 +0200
> Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org> escreveu:
> 
> > On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 03:08:00PM +0100, Lee Jones wrote:
> > > On Thu, 24 Jun 2021, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > >   
> > > > Em Thu, 24 Jun 2021 12:33:28 +0100
> > > > Lee Jones <lee.jones@linaro.org> escreveu:  
> > 
> > > > > > --- /dev/null
> > > > > > +++ b/drivers/mfd/hi6421-spmi-pmic.c
> > > > > > @@ -0,0 +1,316 @@
> > > > > > +// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> > > > > > +/*
> > > > > > + * Device driver for regulators in HISI PMIC IC
> > > > > > + *
> > > > > > + * Copyright (c) 2013 Linaro Ltd.
> > > > > > + * Copyright (c) 2011 Hisilicon.
> > > > > > + * Copyright (c) 2020-2021 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd    
> > > > > 
> > > > > Can this be updated?  
> > > > 
> > > > Do you mean updating the copyrights to cover this year? E.g.
> > > > something like this:
> > > > 
> > > > 	 * Copyright (c) 2013-2021 Linaro Ltd.
> > > > 	 * Copyright (c) 2011-2021 Hisilicon.
> > > > 	 * Copyright (c) 2020-2021 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd  
> > > > 
> > > > Right? Or are you meaning something else?  
> > > 
> > > Yes, that's it.  I know this is just a move, but to MFD, it's new.  
> > 
> > That's not how copyright works. Unless Linaro and Hisilicon made
> > nontrivial changes every year from 2011/2013 to 2021 you should not
> > change those lines like this.
> 
> Only Linaro can answer what happened up to 2018, as this driver 
> originally came from a Linaro tree, which has exactly one commit
> for this driver:
> 
> 	https://github.com/96boards-hikey/linux/commit/08464419fba2417aa849fce976fac9c5f51b3ada#diff-604ef8563dcd9ace6e3e58aac38337c72924b0889f6972d7ee9e15e2335ba964
> 
> After merged upstream at staging, all changes are covered by the
> Huawei's copyright (2020-2021).
> 
> So, I'll just drop this patch. If the information is not accurate,
> someone from the original copyright holders can send followup
> patches.

After taking the time to read up on Copyright rules and expectations,
I think we can pretty much safely say that all of the Copyright
entries above are incorrect.

Copyright dates should only be listed if significant works were
undertaken in each of the years listed.  So unless large adaptions
happened every year since 2011, which I doubt very much, they're
wrong.

-- 
Lee Jones [李琼斯]
Senior Technical Lead - Developer Services
Linaro.org │ Open source software for Arm SoCs
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