Authorship

[Bart Cerneels]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 7:31 PM, Jeff Mitchell <mitchell at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.
>

So what compromise do we execute? I would rename the "Thanks To" tab
to Contributors and add proper attribution as author (with years of
service) to the appropriate people.

Bart