On Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Brian Swetland wrote:

All we ask is that some reasonable acknowledgement of original
authorship is maintained for non-trivial work.  A 5-10 line patch that
deals with mechanical issues of board files or cleans stuff up is no
big deal.  100s of lines that represent some real work is something
else.

So... What about http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.msm/167 ?
Is that good enough for you?  If no, then could you please propose an 
alternative?  If that is indeed good enough, then could we please move on?

What would be useful would be a reasonable convention for
acknowledging multiple authors, perhaps something along the lines of:

Author: Awesome Upstreamer [off-list ref]  or  Main Author [off-list ref]
Committer: Awesome Upstreamer [off-list ref]
Subject: arm: msm8k: acpu clock management

... summary of the patch ...

Original-Author: Joe Firmware Guy [off-list ref]
Original-Author: Kernel Droid [off-list ref]
Signed-off-by: ...

Though I'm not sure "Original-Author" is the best phrasing here...  Or
perhaps just having the patch description end with "This patch is
based on original code by Joe Firmware Guy, Kernel Droid, etc is the
way to go.  I do think that for work where there is one clear original
author, it's nice to leave them as the Author, but at the end of the
day, provided the code's heading in the right direction and the
contributors are acknowledged, that's a detail.

I think a free form list of contributors in the commit log should be 
fine, possibly adding them in CC to the patch submission as well.

There is a _huge_ value in the action of making code palatable for 
mainline inclusion and actually pushing that code into mainline. If you 
do it yourself next time instead of letting your code rot then no one 
might be tempted to stump on your authorship.


Nicolas