Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] docs: submitting-patches: Add Sponsored-by tag to give credits to who sponsored the patch

From: Giulio Benetti
Date: Wed Aug 23 2023 - 19:20:24 EST


Hello Geert, All,

On 21/08/23 09:40, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
Hi Giulio,

On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 2:35 AM Giulio Benetti
<giulio.benetti@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 18/08/23 01:23, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 12:09:57AM +0200, Giulio Benetti wrote:
Sometimes it happens that a Company or a Physical Person sponsors the
creation and/or the upstreaming process of a patch, but at the moment
there is no way to give credits to it. There are some commit that include
a sort of tag "Sponsored by" without the dash to avoid
scripts/checkpatch.pl to complain but a real standard has not been defined.
With this patch let's try to define a method to give credits consistently
including an acknowledge from the sponsor. The goal is to improve
contributions from companies or physical persons that this way should gain
visibility in Linux kernel and so they should be more prone to let the
work done for them for to be upstreamed.

Just adding one data point here, without judging on the merits of this
proposal. I've been requested previously by customers to increase their
visibility in the kernel development statistics, and the way we found to
do so was to sign-off patches with

Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart+customer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

(where "customer" is to be replaced with the customer name).

this approach works good for the developer because of the +customer
mailbox capability but in term of appeal for the final customer I've
been told(by the customer) he would really like more the "Sponsored-by:"
way. To tell the truth while I was looking for an existing alternative
I've found the commits with "Sponsored by:" pseudo-tag that look cooler.

This is my taste of course and the taste of one of my customers, but
to me it's like having a brand shown:
Sponsored-by: Sponsoring Company
vs:
Signed-off-by: Giulio Benetti
<giulio.benetti+sponsor.company@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Personally, I would respond "I'm sorry, but the only advertising
space we offer are Copyright headers (for employees) and
"user+customer@..." or "name (customer) user@..." (for contractors).

This is a good answer. So these are the 2 possible ways to give credits
to sponsors.

Does it make sense if I send a patch describing exactly this?
This is because my finding was only "Sponsored by" that looked good
to me. So I can avoid other possible pain for the future.

And this is a separate tag, so it's harder for the analysis tools
(whose output your customers must be interested in, too?) to
match the tag to the actual Author/Reviewer/...

Right

If I am the customer I'd really prefer the first option.

You are aware this will cause lots of work for the customer, too?
(See below).

[ SNIP ]

+In both cases, to prevent fake credits, either the company or the person should
+send an Acked-by tag placed right under Sponsored-by tag using the same form
+described above. So for example if the patch contains::
+
+ <changelog>
+
+ Sponsored-by: Company Name <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+ Signed-off-by: Developer Name <developer.name@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+
+The result including the answer from the sponsor must be::
+
+ <changelog>
+
+ Sponsored-by: Company Name <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+ Acked-by: Company Name <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+ Signed-off-by: Developer Name <developer.name@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
+
+This way the sponsor agrees to the usage of this tag using its name.

This is also causing more work for maintainers: now they have to check
if any Sponsored-by tags are present, and track if there is a response
with a matching Acked-by tag...

And obviously they should postpone applying the patch until a
confirmation response is sent... which may never happen...

Yes it came into my mind and I wanted to rely only on DCO dropping the
part of acked-by tag. But there are too many cons for Sponsored-by approach.

So I will go for one of the 2 ways I've been pointed.

Thank you
Best regards
--
Giulio Benetti
CEO&CTO@Benetti Engineering sas