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by segfaultbuserr 2298 days ago

Most FOSS licenses don't require attribution (although ethically it's better to do so), however, almost all requires the preservation of copyright notices, and the name of the author is always part of the notice. For example,

> Copyright (C) $years $author

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person [...] subject to the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And usually, the copyright notices appear in the beginning of all files for clarity.

Although some projects with too many developers may agree to use alternative attribution and copyright identification methods, such as git "Sign-Off", an author file, or SPDX machine-readable license notice. In these cases, it's considered a common practice to use a collective name in the copyright notice, such as

But in most cases, it's a bad idea to remove any name from the header.

---

In the Guake's case, the copyright notice is changed to,

with the original name removed. On one hand, the use of a collective name is common, it's not too different from Chromium, or other major projects. In a sense, it's acceptable, as long as the method of author identification is clearly defined (e.g. git sign-off). Anyone contributes the project is assumed to have accepted how attribution is done implicitly.

However, the problem is that the original name is removed - changing the notice retroactively should be done with the permission of the author, which is clearly not obtained here. A common practice in such circumstance is leaving the original copyright year and author in place, and appending new copyright information below (or above) the original notice, so it should be something like this,

This example is generally considered "good" since (1) credit is given where credit is due, (2) it also shows the copyright holders responsible for the project in different period of time.

For example, the copyright notice of Python is,

1 comments

bluesign 2298 days ago

I think the situation here is accidental removal of AUTHORS file only. (With accidental .gitignore config)

I think legally, (also ethically)

Should be fine as long as they keep his name in authors file.

Edit: Actually they switched to pbr [1] , so AUTHORS file is generated on build. Not tracked on git. Original author is in AUTHORS file

[1] https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...

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