On 23.08.2010 15:50, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
I understand that people who create software really want to be acknowledged: it feels good to know that your code is part of products, and it looks good to family, friends, and potential employers.
But the associated costs are that people who do release software have to either have to maintain drastic change-control practices in order to keep the MPL credits list up to date
I've done it myself, when I released Beonex. You just need to gather the Initial Developer and Contributor lines, and basically run sort|uniq on them. You'll get a few dups with " Inc" vs. ", Inc" etc., but that's easily fixed in script or source. It can be automated. I created and ran a few scripts myself.
Leave "credit" to the community
Unfortunately, community failed. For example, although I work for and on and around Mozilla full-time since over 10 years, and am an Initial Developer, e.g. of netwerk/ code, and there's a long list of people scrolled by in Firefox About, I am not among them. Now, you may argue I should not be in the list. Community can fail.
I do not want to rely on the project owner de jour to decide whether he thinks my authorship is relevant or his own contributions are more important. I think that's an understandable concern.
In general, I think the authors of the code must be prominently credited towards end-users, no matter who creates the UI or binary, be it Firefox or Google Chrome based on Gecko - that's why most open-source licenses *do* have a credits clause.
I am happy with the MPL 1.1 clause, I think it was very well formulated as-is, and I don't see why I should give up my guaranteed rights.
Ben _______________________________________________ legal mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/legal
