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Please re-add original author to docs and license

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11–20 of 76 posts

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#11
post #8

Assuming the license hasn't changed, under GPL it was illegal for them to remove the license. Apparently it's still in the "about" window, so maybe that is sufficient for the license, but I'm not sure about removing copyright banners in a bunch of other places...

The license file does not seem changed https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING but it did not contain his copyright notice in the first place.

They seem to have had an AUTHORS file in there that according to git blame was deleted in this commit 2 years ago, possibly by erroneously including AUTHORS in .gitinclude:

https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e...

Before that he was included in the AUTHORS file as "- Gabriel Falcão , 2007", his name still appears in a bunch of places in the code https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&...

I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing.

Couldn't really hurt to just include some attribution imho, not only for him but other contributors as well. It's kind of odd looking to me that one of the two original authors raised an issue on an active looking project and seemingly nobody even bothered to respond there.

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#12
post #9

Credit should always be given where credit is due. I believe this is good etiquette. This might also be required by the original license.

As far as I know, attribution rights are unalienable at least in my jurisdiction. What that means in practice in larger software projects is unclear, but removing attribution for some people while keeping it for others would be against the spirit of the law.

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#13
post #8

Assuming the license hasn't changed, under GPL it was illegal for them to remove the license. Apparently it's still in the "about" window, so maybe that is sufficient for the license, but I'm not sure about removing copyright banners in a bunch of other places...

The license file does not seem changed https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING but it did not contain his copyright notice in the first place. They seem to have had an AUTHORS file in there that according to git blame was deleted in this commit 2 years ago, possibly by erroneously including AUTHORS in .gitinclude: https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e... Before that he was included i…

> I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing.

I found it using git blame on an old file with that notice. The commit: https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/86b1fa8a42b99cbbb75eee...

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#14
I wonder how active the Guake maintainers really are. If you use it on Wayland, you get an error that it can't claim f12 as a key binding. This is because they use some X11 foo for their keybinding. It's easy to set a custom keybinding via Gnome which will allow you to use Guake, however, they have been ignoring requests to just allow Guake to have no binding (as far as it is aware) for some time now. A short time ago they started enforcing a keybinding, strangely. [0]

[0] https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#15
Interestingly (to me at least), I was just reading he memcached website (from another HN submission), and even though it's been completely rewritten in a different language, they still credit Brad Fitzpatrick as the original author.

No reason not to. Anyone arguing otherwise is being petty and mean in my opinion. Sure, a bunch of new people have written some/most/all of the current codebase. But they built on top of the project founder's code. Why _wouldn't_ you give them the credit for that?

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#16
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

> // Copyright 2019 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.

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,

> Copyright (C) 2007-2013 Guake authors

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,

> Copyright (C) 2007 Gabriel Falcão

> Copyright (C) 2008-2013 Guake authors

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,

> Copyright (c) 2001-2019 Python Software Foundation.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam.

> All Rights Reserved.

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#17
post #15

Interestingly (to me at least), I was just reading he memcached website (from another HN submission), and even though it's been completely rewritten in a different language, they still credit Brad Fitzpatrick as the original author. No reason not to. Anyone arguing otherwise is being petty and mean in my opinion. Sure, a bunch of new people have written some/most/all of the current codebase. But they built on top of…

Yeh I agree with this. Licensing and possible legalities aside, I think it’s just the right thing to do.

The issue seems to be getting a bit of attention now (when I posted there was 9 thumbs up, now there is 173 and a PR on the readme), so hopefully the current maintainers (re)visit the issue and give him his slice of credit.

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#18
If anybody reads this and decides it sounds like a nice way to summon a terminal, be aware that if you're a non-Gnome user you can use Yukuake in KDE, and the --drop-down option to the XFCE terminal.

I usually have it bound to Ctrl-` and find it very convenient (also someone satisfying to just show and hide for no reason other than I like the animation).

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#19

Well, as far as I can tell, the Authors file was removed completely. In all of the files that I could find that are old enough for him to have contributed to, his copyright notice remains. In his own branch, the first commit is October 2007 and the vast majority of commits after that are from Lincoln de Sousa. So I don't think anyone was doing anything untoward here. I'm not really familiar with the project, but it d…

The first commit on github is a 77k lines commit that appears to be a migration of the project from svn to git. So you're looking only at later commit history.

The original project lived here: https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome-vte/code/commit_browse...

He explained that and linked to that in his his issue though.

Edit: Linking to the full commit history instead.

Re: Please re-add original author to docs and license

#20

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 s…

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

I think legally, (also ethically)

Copyright (C) 2007-2013 Guake authors

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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