Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] irqchip: al-fic: Introduce Amazon's Annapurna Labs Fabric Interrupt Controller Driver

From: David Woodhouse
Date: Wed Jun 05 2019 - 11:00:53 EST


On Wed, 2019-06-05 at 14:50 +0200, Greg KH wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 01:52:01PM +0300, Talel Shenhar wrote:
> > --- /dev/null
> > +++ b/drivers/irqchip/irq-al-fic.c
> > @@ -0,0 +1,289 @@
> > +// SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
> > +/**
>
> No need for kernel-doc format style here.
>
> > + * Copyright 2019 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
>
> "or its affiliates"? You know the answer to this, don't keep us in
> suspense. Put the proper copyright holder here please, otherwise this
> is totally useless.
>
> Well, copyright notices are technically useless anyway, but lawyers like
> to cargo-cult with the best of them, so it should be correct at the
> least.

The "or its affiliates" form seems to be fairly common; there are
hundreds of them in the kernel already. I think it's something to do
with *not* having to manually update copyright notices to keep track of
the precise legal entities which make up a large corporation, as things
change.

Is there a particular problem with it, and an ongoing campaign to
eradicate it from the kernel? Any reason we should actually go and
spend time dealing with legal nonsense instead of just using the text
the lawyers have asked us to use?

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