Re: [GNUnet-developers] Moral rights: credits

[t3sserakt]

On 07.10.2019 20:29, Schanzenbach, Martin wrote:

I do not have a strong opinion either way, but I find the argument not
convincing.
I strongly believe that a part of the source/component has probably been
written and is maintained by a very limited number of people. Occasionally
somebody might "adopt" this but at that point this person quite clearly
has the agency and responsibility to do add a new @authors line.

Somebody adding an occasional patch is of course also the author of that
particular change, but the authors info is more than credit to the
copyright/code, it is also an indication who is most likely knowledgeable
about that part, e.g. if somebody wants to use it or improve/fix it or just
understand it.

Hence, from the point of view of credit/copyright I do not really care.
But as a general indicator who wrote that part (esp. in GNUnet: that component)
I find it useful.

I agree with Martin, but there are still problems we need to address. What about those authors who wrote most of the code, but aren't available for questions any more. What about people who aren't authors of code, but despite that know much about the code. Maybe we shouldn't call those persons being knowledgeable authors, but somehow different.

Cheers

t3sserakt 

BR

On 7. Oct 2019, at 19:51, Christian Grothoff <address@hidden> wrote:

Signed PGP part
Hi all,

Sorry for cross-posting, but 'someone' just triggered me and this
applies to multiple packages, at least in theory:

On 10/7/19 7:33 PM, someone wrote (privately):

Trying to define authors of individual source files (as opposed to
individual commits) seems hopelessly subjective as they get extensively
edited over time.

This was about the community removing author attributions in individual
source files from glibc.  I have been thinking about this as well
recently, and 'someone's message succinctly describes the issue: we have
@author comments, but they don't really reflect contributors. Often we
forget to add, copy or even remove @author tags, and this is not easily
fixed either.

Naturally, this is not about removing (all) credit: we would still have
both the top-level AUTHORS file and the attribution via the Git history.

So, please do let me know if you (for whatever reason) would object to
removing the per-source file @author attributions. If nobody has a
(reasonable / sustained) objection, I'll probably remove the @author
lines in a few weeks.

Thanks!

Christian

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