Re: Copyright/Credits/Author

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Franck Joncourt <franck@debian.org> writes:

> I have a question about how to manage contributions in an open source
> project.

Thank you for taking seriously how copyright affects recipients of your
work.

> The matter is some people have contributed significantly to, for
> example, the utils.c file, however they have no copyright.

I'm not sure what you mean by “they have no copyright”. All such
contributions have copyright held by someone, usually the author.

Do you mean their copyright is not properly described in the source?

> I was thinking about adding something like this in each file header:
>
> Author: Fwknop developers (see AUTHORS file
>            - https://github.com/mrash/fwknop/blob/master/AUTHORS)
> Copyright: 2012-2014 Fwknop developers and contributors
>            (see https://github.com/mrash/fwknop/blob/master/CREDITS)

Using a URL for this purpose isn't good, because at some future point
the documents at those URLs might be different, or even not available
any more; but the text needs to remain relevant for many years
(copyright lasts many decades).

So it's better to not refer to any URL for such information, and refer
only to files in the source work itself.

For example:

    Fwknop is developed primarily by the people listed in the file ‘AUTHORS’.
    Copyright © 2012–2014 Fwknop developers and contributors. For a full
    list of contributors, see the file ‘CREDITS’.

This is a common (and, IMO, usually satisfactory) solution to the
problem of attribution for a work with many copyright holders: Avoid
references to URLs for information that needs to persist over time, put
all the information centrally in the source tarball, with a clear
referenced from each file in that tarball.

-- 
 \      “If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly |
  `\                      owned if it is not shared.” —Saint Augustine |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney