Kernel contributions from organisations and individual privacy

[Chris Packham]

It's not a concern for the _employer_ (unless we say something
particularly inflammatory), in fact the organisation sees the benefit
of the company name getting out there in technical circles.

It's more a case of the _employee_ not wanting their name to show up
in mailing list archives, similar to people that don't want a phone
book listing or twitter/facebook/google+. One option is for someone
(like me) to do the submission and work with upstream to get the
change accepted, I don't have a problem with this but it does mean
that if/when I move on I take the kudos (as well as the criticism)
with me and the company loses out.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 4:58 PM, Jason Ball <jason at ball.net> wrote:
> I had a similar situation and managed to route patches via an intermediary
> to protect my employers anonymity at the time.   You may (should) be able to
> find an appropriate sponsor depending on the nature of the customisations.
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 7:19 PM, Chris Packham <judge.packham at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> This came up at work today and I'm not sure where the best place to
>> ask is. I almost went straight to the lkml but I figured I'd start
>> with newbies first.
>>
>> We've been using the Linux kernel in our products for a number of
>> years now. We're doing all the right things w.r.t GPL compliance but
>> we're not actively pushing that much upstream. This means we're
>> effectively maintaining our own Linux fork with very few resources.
>> I'm trying to avoid this by encouraging developers to get their
>> changes upstreamed.
>>
>> This is good for our organisation because we don't have to re-do our
>> changes when we need to take a new kernel version. Most developers see
>> this as a good career building for them. But some developers value
>> their individual privacy over career progression.
>>
>> My initial response to that was well we can just make a dummy gmail
>> account or even setup a swdept@$organisation shared address. But
>> SubmittingPatches actually says to sign patches with your real name
>> not a pseudonym.
>>
>> Does this basically mean people that value privacy are unable to
>> contribute?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Chris
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Kernelnewbies mailing list
>> Kernelnewbies at kernelnewbies.org
>> http://lists.kernelnewbies.org/mailman/listinfo/kernelnewbies
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> --
>
> Teach your kids Science, or somebody else will :/
>
> jason at ball.net
> vk2vjb at google.com
> callsign: vk2vjb
>
>