On 16/05/07, Bhutani Meeta-W19091 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Motorola would like to understand if kernel.org has a contributor agreement (or a copyright assignment agreement) that is posted somewhere ?
As far as I know, no.
We are investigating what would be needed from a legal standpoint to possibly contribute in the future.
I am not a lawyer, but my personal understanding is this: 1. Any code you contribute has to be licensed under the GNU GPL v2 (preferably) or a different, but 100% compatible, license (usually acceptable). For the text of the GNU GPL v2, please see the file "COPYING" in the root of the kernel source tree. For a list of other Open Source licenses, see http://www.opensource.org/licenses/category (note: GPLv2 is strongly prefered) 2. When submitting your code, please include Signed-off-by: lines as pr Section 11 in Documentation/SubmittingPatches 3. Make sure your patches adhere to the guidelines laid out in Documentation/CodingStyle (unless a specific maintainer tells you otherwise) A good place to start when looking for info is Documentation/HOWTO. A few quotes from Documentation/HOWTO that seem relevant (please do read the document in full yourself for the full story - this is a good starting point) can be found below; " ... It contains instructions on how to become a Linux kernel developer and how to learn to work with the Linux kernel development community. ... Legal Issues ------------ The Linux kernel source code is released under the GPL. Please see the file, COPYING, in the main directory of the source tree, for details on the license. If you have further questions about the license, please contact a lawyer, and do not ask on the Linux kernel mailing list. The people on the mailing lists are not lawyers, and you should not rely on their statements on legal matters. ... " Various other documents that are worth reading in the kernel source : README Documentation/SubmitChecklist Documentation/SubmittingDrivers Documentation/SubmittingPatches Documentation/Changes There are many more documents in the Documentation/ directory that are worth reading as well... Looking forward to your contributions. -- Jesper Juhl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Don't top-post http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/T/top-post.html Plain text mails only, please http://www.expita.com/nomime.html - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/