Here's something that's confused me for a little while. Perhaps someone in this group can shed some light? It's a bit off topic, I guess, but I'm not sure where else to ask.
>From several sources I've gathered that it's not healthy for an open source project to have authors' names in the source code. It would promote unwanted territorialism. Make potential contributors hesitant to touch the code. Also, it's never clear when you've earned the right to have your name up there. From Producing Open Source Software, by Karl Fogel: "In order to combat incipient territorialism, or even the appearance of it, many projects have taken the step of banning the inclusion of author names or designated maintainer names in source files. I wholeheartedly agree with this practice: we follow it in the Subversion project, and it is more or less official policy at the Apache Software Foundation." In principle I agree. However, to apply the GNU GPL license to the code, it would appear a copyright notice in each file is mandatory. I quote from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html: "Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice (such as “Copyright 1999 Terry Jones”), and a statement of copying permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL)." Karl Fogel agrees. From his book: "In general, the notice you put in each source file does not have to look exactly like the one above, as long as it starts with the same notice of copyright holder and date, states the name of the license, and makes it clear where to view the full license." So... how does this work? Is there a way to have the cake and eat it too? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Hosting at Google Code" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-code-hosting?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
