Subject: Re: [PATCH] Hwmon for Taco

From: Anton Vorontsov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 23:13:14 +0300

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 01:02:51PM -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:30:00 -0500
> Sean MacLennan <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> > Ok, here is the ad7414 only. taco-dtm is no more!
> 
> Cool.  Couple more things.
> 
> 1) This should go through the hwmon maintainer.  Send it to him.
> (CC'ing this list is of course fine.)
> 
> 2) You always need the Signed-off-by: for each patch you send
> 
> 3) If you didn't author the code (this seems to come from Stefan), then
> you need the Signed-off-by from the original author.

Nope. Signed-off-by means completely different thing. It isn't
copyright, it isn't authorship. It's an information (for the history)
whom to bother if code appeared to be either:
a) broken;
b) stolen from the closed source product;
c) patented (where applicable).

There are Copyright (c) and Author: strings in the files for the
credits. If original patch had these strings, then yes, you must
keep them.

But no one needs author's Signed-off-by, it having zero information
you're hinting about. More than that, there were precedents when
author insisted on removing his Signed-off-by from the modified
patch (when S-o-b used as a permit into someone's tree).

Btw, kernel.org is distributing linux tarballs without changelogs,
thus without Signed-off-by lines. Nobody complains.

Yes, it's common sense and politeness to keep Signed-off-by lines
intact (and the order of these lines), but it's not strict
requirement. "Based on the patch from ..." is the equivalent of
this politeness.

> You're getting there :)  These are all "newbie" type mistakes so keep
> plugging away.
> 
> josh

Good luck,

-- 
Anton Vorontsov
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