On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 03:29:01PM +0200, Otto Moerbeek wrote: > On Sun, May 04, 2008 at 12:12:37PM +0200, Pieter Verberne wrote: > > > But in general, we choose to remain known as author. > > > That is our privilege for the files we created or modified > > > extensively. Whatever you choose to do with things you publish is your > > > decision. > > Uhm.. "to remain known as author": sounds vague to me. (maybe because > > of my english) . However, when you put anything in public domain, you > > will stay recognized as the (orginal) author. (in most cases). Look at > > qmail, or public domain Korn shell. There only may by a chance that > > some autors names are 'lost' sometimes (in redistributions) because > > of the lack of obligation to mention the authors. > > That is exactly the thing we want to prevent. We create source code > and want our names to remain in the source. We are proud of what we > have created. We are proud others find it useful and let them use our > source code in the way they want to, as long as we are still > recognized as authors according to copyright law. So we want our names > to remain in the files, and not just as "common knowledge", which is > vague and often wrong.
I don't think that public domain would cause credits to be lost (often). Version control, mailing list archives (internet archive, Wikipedia) keep those credits also. Well, maybe when someone reuses part of the code...
