Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] GPL defense issues

[Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>]

On Tuesday 30 August 2016, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 05:33:36PM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > 
> > > Anyway, like I was saying, no one from Linaro ever contributed
> > > something meaningful (except some cross-tree patches, and the usual
> > > "maintainance" patches).
> > 
> > I'm not surprised at all. Most of the kernel work we do in
> > Linaro is intentionally cross-platform (so it benefits all members
> > equally), or it is done on those platforms that the members decide
> > are important upstream.
> > 
> One may wonder how your Linux kernel patches and merges are classified
> per the above.
>
> Thank you for all your work in the Linux kernel. It is anything but
> meaningless, and it obviously goes far beyond "some cross-tree patches,
> and the usual maintenance patches".

I'm sure Maxime was specifically referring to mach-sunxi specific code
here, but it's clear how that could be interpreted differently, or
taken out of context.

Looking at the commits in mach-sunxi from all Linaro developers,
his categorization is completely right:

$ git log --oneline --no-merges --author=linaro --author=arnd --author=robh torvalds/master arch/arm/mach-sunxi/
5c34a4e89c74 ARM: do away with ARCH_[WANT_OPTIONAL|REQUIRE]_GPIOLIB
117d4f59affa cpufreq: sunxi: Use generic platdev driver
e58cf0193c0f ARM: sunxi: allow building without reset controller
1146b600044d ARM: sunxi: fix build for THUMB2_KERNEL
90bc8ac77dc8 ARM: select HAVE_SMP for V7 multi-platform
ddb902cc3459 ARM: centralize common multi-platform kconfig options

However, Linaro also has a number of subsystem maintainers and most of
the sunxi specific drivers were reviewed and/or merged by someone
in Linaro who is doing that work for all ARM platforms, whether they
are made by Linaro member companies or not.

	Arnd