Please re-add original author to docs and license • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by gsemet » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 12:50 PM UTC

gfalcao wrote: post #21

Hello, I'm Gabriel, the original author of Guake. Let me clarify the whole story: In 2006 I had just gotten into college and was learning Python by myself, my English skills (also self-taught) were pretty low and I had to rely a lot on whatever material was available in Portuguese (I'm from Brazil). In 2007 I had an amazing college teacher, the "drop of water in the desert" kind of teacher. He was trying to convince…

Hi. I am Gaetan, the current maintainer of Guake ! I am so sorry to see you find your "authorship" having disappeared from the Guake history, there was no intent from my part to remove it ! I only discussed with the maintainer back in 2013 from Pierre Yves, there has been many maintainers over the years I do not even know !

This history would have indeed a very place in the HISTORY page in the documentation, do not hesitate to write it, or with your permission, I copy/paste most of your comment.

Do not hesite to reach me in order to find a good way to put satisfying credits in the history.

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

#32

Post by bluesign » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 12:51 PM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #10

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…

yeah they switched to pbr, so AUTHORS file is generated on build. Not tracked on git

PS: actually original author is in AUTHORS file

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

#33

Post by Anthony-G » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 12:52 PM UTC

Anthony-G wrote: post #26

tastroder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The git commit you linked would have required the committer to explicitly remove the `AUTHORS` file from the code-base. If a file is already being tracked, it won’t stop being tracked if a corresponding pattern is added to `.gitignore`. Removing the file in this way was most likely intentional and not erroneous.

From the most recent response to this issue, it seems that the file was removed with the intention that the list of authors could be programmatically generated: https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...

I also see that Gabriel has now been credited in the project’s `README.rst`.

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

#34

Post by gsemet » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 12:53 PM UTC

mikekchar wrote: post #10

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 AUTHORS files is generated from the git history, done by PBR.

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

#35

Post by Cthulhu_ » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: 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…

One reason I can think of: Egos. "Why should this guy get credit after having left the project years ago while I still work full-time on it and all I get is an entry in a generated contributors file? No fair!"

I mean the OP (Gabriel) hints at wanting to use it in his CV (proverbially); wouldn't anyone that made a significant contribution? Then of course, how would you define significant?

It's a can of worms and one of the ways around it is to reduce all contributors to "you are not special" status.

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

#36

Post by VBprogrammer » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 1:02 PM UTC

bigiain wrote: 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…

This strikes me as a very old question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

In this specific case there seems to be no argument that the original author is who he says he is and he has given specific reasons why it would be in his advantage to be credited as the original author I can't imagine many people denying him that.

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

#37

Post by gsemet » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 1:03 PM UTC

anilakar wrote: post #12

jkh1 wrote: 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.

There were no indent in removing or altering the history. Just a project that evolves over time, files are renamed, splitted, etc, and the list of copyright at the beginning of the file is no more relevant. The real truth is inside the git history, sadly part of this truth has been lost by the origian import, and even myself, the current maintainer, does not know it !

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

#38

Post by sigzero » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 1:08 PM UTC

chrisseaton wrote: post #27

gfalcao wrote: post #21

Hello, I'm Gabriel, the original author of Guake. Let me clarify the whole story: In 2006 I had just gotten into college and was learning Python by myself, my English skills (also self-taught) were pretty low and I had to rely a lot on whatever material was available in Portuguese (I'm from Brazil). In 2007 I had an amazing college teacher, the "drop of water in the desert" kind of teacher. He was trying to convince…

> I'd have to install libqt on my Debian? No way! Why are you so firmly opposed to libqt?

At that time the majority of Debian users were very much purists.

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

#39

Post by gfalcao » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 1:21 PM UTC

gsemet wrote: post #31

gfalcao wrote: post #21

Hello, I'm Gabriel, the original author of Guake. Let me clarify the whole story: In 2006 I had just gotten into college and was learning Python by myself, my English skills (also self-taught) were pretty low and I had to rely a lot on whatever material was available in Portuguese (I'm from Brazil). In 2007 I had an amazing college teacher, the "drop of water in the desert" kind of teacher. He was trying to convince…

Hi. I am Gaetan, the current maintainer of Guake ! I am so sorry to see you find your "authorship" having disappeared from the Guake history, there was no intent from my part to remove it ! I only discussed with the maintainer back in 2013 from Pierre Yves, there has been many maintainers over the years I do not even know ! This history would have indeed a very place in the HISTORY page in the documentation, do not h…

Hello Gaetan, thank you so much for adding the authorship back. Please don't get me wrong, I know you're not responsible for it disappearing and I'm not looking to blame anyone. I'm happy that Guake is still being active maintained.

I'll submit a pull-request with the story soon.

Thank you!

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

#40

Post by JangoSteve » Mon, Mar 09, 2020, 1:23 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #35

bigiain wrote: 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…

One reason I can think of: Egos. "Why should this guy get credit after having left the project years ago while I still work full-time on it and all I get is an entry in a generated contributors file? No fair!" I mean the OP (Gabriel) hints at wanting to use it in his CV (proverbially); wouldn't anyone that made a significant contribution? Then of course, how would you define significant? It's a can of worms and one o…

To be fair though, that's kind of life. The originators of any given thing always get remembered as the originators, despite how long they worked on it compared to anyone else since. This isn't just code. I mean, 30 years from now, George Lucas will still be remembered as the creator of Star Wars, even though by then I'm sure the writers at Disney will have produced 20x more stories around it, and Stan Lee/Jack Kirby will still be remembered as the creators of the characters others have already built upon and adapted since then. Even the USA has had far more people build and mold the country into what it is since the founding fathers. It's just one of the hallmarks of our society I think to romanticize and glorify the original creators of works.

I think reducing everyone to "you are not special" status is a pretty weak solution that probably wrongs more people than it rights. And I think egos are a pretty weak reason to do it.