That is by no means plagiarism. If not communicated clearly, can however lead to disappointment of those who submitted the patch. An 'inspired-by' comment would have been nice.
That is by no means plagiarism. If not communicated clearly, can however lead to disappointment of those who submitted the patch. An 'inspired-by' comment would have been nice.
Plagiarism means that the kernel maintainer included the code and pretended that it was their original creation and nothing of the sort happened so I don't think that word should be used in this context. Nobody doubts the OP wrote the code, nobody is saying that they did not and nobody passes it off as their own.
If there is a public record that makes it obvious that you've plagiarised, then that doesn't mean you're not guilty of plagiarism. It just means you failed to cover your tracks.
None of this has anything to do with copyright. Not all plagiarism involves copyright violations and not all copyright violations are instances of plagiarism.
I am using the bar that you can find by googling 'plagiarism policy' and reading any number of documents explaining what constitutes plagiarism in an academic context.
Plagiarism is not a crime, so the kernel maintainers can choose to decide that it's socially acceptable in the context of kernel development if they want to.
These long running projects all have their own styles and conventions for interaction (LKML itself being one of those) and the onus is on newcomers to familiarize themselves with that. Authorship, especially in the context of a project of this magnitude and with so many different people maintaining different parts of it is always going to be somewhat nebulous, because after all, you're changing a tiny little bit in a huge machine and anything worthy of copyright is usually expected to stand alone as a 'work'. That's definitely not the case here. And so the sign-off becomes a critical bit, if you omit that then you've just created a problem for the maintainer. Personally, I would never expect to be named author of a patch sent to the kernel mailing list, but if I wrote a sizeable subsystem then I would definitely expect that kind of recognition.
For patches like this your pay-off is the fact that they are taken into consideration at all.
https://www.mail-archive.com/linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org/m...
> I'm sorry about the way I handled your patch. I should have spent more time working with you to develop your patch.
> I agree that the Reported-by tag doesn't properly reflect the contribution you made, I should have realised that at the time