On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 11:49 AM, Nicolas Pitre [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sat, 22 Jan 2011, Brian Swetland wrote:

quoted

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?

Something like:

Based on code written by:
   <list of names>

is absolutely fine by me.  Including patch counts, etc, is not essential.

quoted

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.

That seems reasonable to me.

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.

Certainly.  As long as we're acknowledging both the contributions of
those who wrote the code and those who are doing the heavy lifting to
get it upstream, we're happy.  We are, of course, working on doing
things better in the future -- the tegra2 efforts are a direct result
of our desire to get things right on a newer project.

Brian