You need to insert the copyright notice as a way of saying you own the code in the file. After you claim ownership you can choose a license to release your work under. The important part of kernel development is placing the GPL notice at the top of each kernel source file (copy it from another kernel file). The copyright notice is just a statement saying you have the right to license the code under the GPL. Once you license under the GPL, the GPL allows many more uses of the code than simple copyright does.
Some projects require copyright assignment, but the kernel does not. The main reason for copyright assignment is in case the license needs to be changed later. For example Mozilla was originally released under the MPL. The Mozilla organization was forced to track down and get written permission from every copyright holder when they reissued Mozilla under the LGPL. Some of these authors could not be located which required chunks of Mozilla to be rewritten. Now Mozilla gets copyright right assignment from each author in order to allow them to change the license again if necessary. The kernel has long passed having any ability to track down all of the copyright holders since some of them are dead. It will be GPLv2 forever because there is no way to change it. If you want to contribute your code to mainline it has to have at the minimum: a copyright statement and the GPLv2 license. If you want you can also include the MIT license in addition to the GPLv2. Including the MIT license allows the code the be shared with BSD. On Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 9:30 AM, Stefan Monnier <monn...@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote: >>> Also copyright like this looks weird: >>> " * Copyright (C) 2015-2020 Allwinner Technology Co., Ltd." >>> Living in the future? :) >> I'm granting all the copyright to my newly written code to Allwinner so no... >> It's 2015 and the copyright goes 5 years... Am I wrong? ^^' > > Yes, you're wrong: the copyright statement is about when the copyright > starts, basically, so it can't be in the future. The duration of the > copyright is then defined based on this information combined with the > law (which is not 5 years, but more like 75 years, or maybe even "75 > years after the death of the author", and has changed over the time, > with the tendency being to extend copyright towards infinity, since > those decisions are mostly taken by people who have personal financial > incentives to extend the coverage as much as they can get away with (or > are close to people who have such)). > > > Stefan > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "linux-sunxi" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- Jon Smirl jonsm...@gmail.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to linux-sunxi+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
