Re: [libmicrohttpd] [GNUnet-developers] Moral rights: credits

[Schanzenbach, Martin]

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.

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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