Authorship

[Jeff Mitchell]

On 09/24/2012 09:51, Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 11:17 PM, Bart Cerneels
> <bart.cerneels at kde.org> wrote:
>> The currently active Amarok team has defined the authors list to
>> contain current contributors that have ownership (written it or
>> maintaining it for a while) of amarok components or non-coding
>> contributions to the project. As far as I can tell there is no legal
>> reason to list all past contributors as authors.
>> Myriam pushed a commit reflecting what we thought was the current
>> state of that list yesterday. A few people don't seem to agree and
>> reverted their own entries.
>
> At the time of the discussion, I asked if we were moving
> no-longer-active authors to a "previous author" category or similar,
> and was assured that this was what was being done. After examining 
> the
> diff, I see that that is *not* true, and the former authors have been
> moved into Contributors.
>
> This seems disrespectful to me, and not in the spirit of teamwork 
> that
> we want to foster. Legalities? I believe those are satisfied by
> headers. Our About dialog is about community, not legality. I very
> much hope we can respectfully honor the work of major contributors in
> the past, and not move them into the same bin in which we place those
> who have contributed a few euros or a couple of patches.

I agree with the sentiment, although I should mention that in the past 
we've moved previous authors to contributors...but for lack of a better 
solution.