Re: copyright issues and derivative work (the case of matlab-mode)

[Richard Stallman]

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  > > Yes, but as we've noticed, people don't look at that very often.
  > > A person who has contributed for a year, and checked in only per
  > > own work, and then for the first time checks in someone else's work,
  > > is very likely to forget about --author.

  > There's nothing we can do about things people forget, 

That's true, I agree, if we consider only changes in the informational
files such as CONTRIBUTING.  But if we consider ideas that go beyond
that, yes there are things that might work.

An extreme example just to prove that point: if we make a special
command for making commits in Emacs, and it asks each time "Is there
any code in this commit that you did not write," and told contributors
always to use that special command for commits on Emacs, no one would
ever forget to enter the author.

Maybe that would be considered too annoying, but it shows that there
are ways to have an effect on this.

We could approve certain contributors to commit code written
by others, and tell all other contributors not to do that.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)