[sdruskat]

This is indeed something that needs to be solved. I think the current path in the schol comms community leans towards having contributors (with different roles) as well as authors.

Also, summary authors ("the <project> contributors") is one way to relatively elegantly circumvent this, and something you could do in a CFF file for example (these are being picked up by Zenodo).

[pwdisswordfish8]

When citing collective written works (like conference paper collections), the editors’ names are usually listed. I don’t see why not do the same here: cite the maintainers’ names when citing the whole, and also specific authors when citing particular fragments.

[angrais]

Why not simply cite the original creators? Then if major features changed amongst versions then the key contributors?

Original creators (whose idea the software is) should be first author.

[Athas]

As I understand it, an important point of software citations is to help academic researchers who are (unfortunately) measured by citation metrics. Will whatever tools the bean counters are using connect "the <project> contributors" citations properly to people? I don't see how they could.