Re: [PATCH 00/49] DRM driver for Hikey 970

[Daniel Stone]

Hi Mauro,

On Tue, 25 Aug 2020 at 12:30, Mauro Carvalho Chehab
<mchehab+huawei@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Sorry, but I can't agree that review is more important than to be able
> to properly indicate copyrights in a valid way at the legal systems that
> it would apply ;-)

The way to properly indicate copyright coverage is to insert a
copyright statement in the file. This has been the accepted way of
communicating copyright notices since approximately the dawn of time.
The value of the 'author' field within a chain of git commits does not
have privileged legal value.

If what you were saying is true, it would be impossible for any
project to copy code from any other project, unless they did git
filter-branch and made sure to follow renames too. As others have
noted, it would also be impossible for any patches to be developed
collaboratively by different copyright holders, or for maintainers to
apply changes.

This is accepted community practice and has passed signoffs from a
million different lawyers and copyright holders. If you wish to break
with this and do something different, the onus is on you to provide
the community with _specific_ legal advice; if this is accepted, the
development model would have to drastically change in the presence of
single pieces of code developed by multiple distinct copyright
holders.

Cheers,
Daniel