Re: [RFC v2] MEDIA: Driver for ON Semi AR0521 camera sensor

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Krzysztof,

CC'ing Greg to get his expert opinion on the topic.

On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 06:57:55AM +0200, Krzysztof Hałasa wrote:
> Hi Kieran, and others,
> 
> Kieran Bingham <kieran.bingham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> >>> The work is not published under GPL.
> >
> > This seems like an odd thing to say when your patch explicitly contains:
> >
> >> +++ b/drivers/media/i2c/ar0521.c
> >> @@ -0,0 +1,1060 @@
> >> +// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> 
> Such tags have meaning only in the kernel context, when signed-off etc.
> Alone, they aren't legal statements, especially when I explicitly state
> that it's not signed-off-by me yet. Nevertheless...
> 
> Obviously, this code was always meant to be GPLed and it seems really
> crazy to me that we even have to have such conversations - about
> a non issue, at least from my POV.
> 
> The fact is that 6 years ago I wrote driver for a SDTV frame grabber -
> and another developer "took" the development from me, and published as
> his own. This wasn't probably illegal - after all my driver was covered
> by the GPL from the start. But was it really how we all want things to
> work in Linux? With such experience, is anybody surprised I want to
> avoid this history repeating itself?
> 
> For other patches I don't care about such formalities, but this driver
> is a work paid by an external entity and it would be unfortunate to
> end up the same way as the tw686x driver.
> 
> 
> I stated multiple times I will sign this code off when it's accepted.
> Is it really a problem? Really?
> 
> If so... perhaps there is some other way?
> 
> I'd hate to think that the next time I'm to keep my code unpublished.

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart