axienet driver copyrights

Dear Ariane and Daniel, [cc: John Linn, John Williams, David Miller and netdev]

I have several questions about one patch which was added to mainline Linux tree. Below is information about the patch:

drivers/net/ethernet/xilinx: added Xilinx AXI Ethernet driver (sha1: 8a3b7a252dca9fb28c23b5bf76c49180a2b60d3b)

The whole driver contains your copyright in 3 files but I don't believe
that you are authors of significant changes to be polite to write there your copyright.
I really appreciate that someone invested time to add this driver to the mainline but I am not comfortable that you will be identify as authors of this driver because you are not!

Maintainer for this driver should be Xilinx which has done this driver. I also see that you have integrated all changes I have done to it. We have done these changes on Xilinx request to improve the driver stability and performance.

I have spent some time to list your changes you have done to be sure that my first feeling was wrong but it is not.

There are changes which do nothing with functionality.
1. Clean the driver by checkpatch.pl script.
2. Copy axienet_ior/iow to header file
3. axienet_device_reset resort.

Can you tell me what significant changes you have done in this driver?

I know the whole history of this driver and I have never heard about you and your changes pointing me that you have just took the latest version from PetaLogix or Xilinx git repository and use checkpatch.pl script to fix coding style violations.

I don't think that using checkpatch + 2 simple changes is not enough to be identified as author.

Can you please correct me?

Thanks,
Michal

David: Would it be possible to ping me everytime when there is any patch around xilinx ethernet controller. I have all equipment for testing it and it is my day job to take care about microblaze/xilinx drivers.

Michal Simek, Ing. (M.Eng)
w: www.monstr.eu p: +42-0-721842854
Maintainer of Linux kernel 2.6 Microblaze Linux - http://www.monstr.eu/fdt/
Microblaze U-BOOT custodian

Yes, we mainly spent time to refactor this patch (in particular removing duplicate code parts), make it work under the latest kernel, make it kernel coding convention compliant and included it into Kconfig.

But feel free to remove us from the header, sure, that should be no problem at all.

I guess we should have CC'ed you when submitting. Sorry that we have forgotten that.

From: Michal Simek <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:15:24 +0200

This is a completely unreasonable request, sorry. The burdon is on you to watch carefully the netdev list for patches you are interested in.