Re: On Sponsor Notices

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: Sep 24, 2008, 23:43 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90809241643i1e366dfbtea8dbdd9a1bc1de5@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20080924225120.GL10544@machine.or.cz>

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Petr Baudis <pasky@suse.cz> wrote:

>  to follow up a little on the "This patch has been sponsored by
> Novartis" messages - I have been on a summer internship at Novartis busy
> deploying Git and these patches (still quite a few more to come, mostly
> for gitweb) have been one of the main outputs of that work.

In my case, if the contribution is done at the behest of a client the copyright is theirs (they paid for my work, and it's a "work for hire" in legal terms). So

 - if the contribution is large, I tend to add a copyright line (see
git-cvsserver: copyright != authors, though that's out of date now)

 - they probably have to provide sign-off, so s-o-b line is appropriate

>  However, I'm not sure if acknowledging the Novartis-originated patches
> in the log message like this is the best practice and we will understand
> if the maintainers will decide to strip these notices when applying the
> patches.

AIUI, the signed-off-by line is meant to track this, and it serves both legal purposes and a as recognition.

cheers,

-- 
 martin.langhoff@gmail.com
 martin@laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff