I recently submitted some patches with fixes and improvements derived from our work on the Juno platform. Laszlo very politely queried my "sign off" of the patches which bore Sami's name as author and gracefully suggested the proper "S-o-b" style. Others have since queried my consequent strategy of appending sign-offs from the whole team.
The position is that Sami did the task of extracting changes from our internal (offline) Subversion repository and merging them into a Tianocore clone from GitHub. The Git "author" shows only that. (As it happens, Sami was the producer of most of the changes, but that is incidental.) We have neither time, nor inclination, to delve in 4 years of offline development history simply to unravel the original author and all contributors for each line of code. The main point is that as part of our contracts of employment we assign all of our IP rights in the code to ARM. I assume other companies have similar contractual terms over IP (everywhere I have ever worked had). As tech lead I am tasked with evaluating the team's code and submitting what is suitable to Tianocore, so ARM effectively delegates the authority to release that (ARM) IP to me. That is, ARM owns the code and gifts it to Tianocore; an individual employee is only involved as a paid agent of ARM. Obviously commits and submissions from an ARM e-mail address cannot be personal contributions, so residual rights as author are not relevant. However, the current "S-o-b" semantics on the list seems to be based on purely personal contributions. That takes no account of work done by a team within an organisation, or the fact that not everybody in a team need interact directly with Git. So, can we come to some agreement about how that (corporate) sign off is to be indicated, and what it is intended to achieve, anyway, given that EDK2 contributors are members of UEFI? (NOTE: This is not about an author's right to the IP, which is retained. It is about the meaning of authorship and sign-off by an individual, of code generated at the expense of an organisation.) Regards, Evan IMPORTANT NOTICE: The contents of this email and any attachments are confidential and may also be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and do not disclose the contents to any other person, use it for any purpose, or store or copy the information in any medium. Thank you. _______________________________________________ edk2-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/edk2-devel
