FOSS copyright declaration with major and minor contributors
I am working on a FOSS project where I am the main author. In every source file, I have a copyright and license statement at the top of the file. The copyright notice calls me the copyright owner. From time to time I receive contributions from other developers. Sometimes these contributions add new files, and sometimes they just change existing files.
What is a common or recommended practice in the FOSS world to declare copyrights to small contributors? I can think of these options:
- Just mention the main contributors in the copyright notice and add minor contributors to the SPASING or PARTICIPANTS file.
- Just mention the major contributors to the copyright notice and add minor authors as (additional) authors to the source files they created or modified.
- Add minor contributors to copyright holders in every file they've changed or created.
Thanks in advance for some hints.
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I would assign copyright to "My Contributors" and provide a list of all contributors (separated by major and minor, if you like) in a separate file. It also allows you to properly assign contributors who don't directly contribute code to the project.
Your source control system should keep track of who commits what changes, and for most projects this really shouldn't be that important. In an open source project, in particular, it is about the end product and not about phased contributions.
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IANAL - I'm not a lawyer. For legal advice, consult a lawyer.
Make sure you are using the correct open source license.
See what reputable projects are doing - Apache, GCC, PHP, Tcl.
I would suggest flagging individual copyright holders on the files they've modified. Where they made the file and you subsequently made changes, list them as the original copyright owner and add yourself as one of the copyright owners. The company I work for uses either "© Copyright 2009 CompanyName" or "© Copyright 2001,2009 CompanyName" (only from the first year and last year of changes, but does not contain compound lists of years such as 1996-8,2000, 2003-6) to identify copyright in the source code. You can have the same string for each participant. Also, you need to worry about the "©" character set because the UTF-8 representation is different (2 bytes) from the ISO 8859-1 representation. GNU recommends using '(C) 'as a surrogate for' © '.
I think, however, that this proposal is harsher than using larger projects (like the one above).
You should look at how GNU and FSF do it; they require (or require of them) that all contributors to the software project associate copyright with the FSF in order to avoid any possibility of dispute. The management supports what they expect.
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Rather than maintaining a separate CREDITS file, I like to lend to small contributors directly in my LICENSE file, annotating them with "thank you" instead of the "copyright" prefix. If they later become major contributors, I can easily switch my status from "thanks" to "copyright" while maintaining the chronological sequence of all contributors. For example, my Tork project LICENSE file follows this format:
Copyright 2010 Major Contributor 1 <email>
Copyright 2011 Major Contributor 2 <email>
Thanks to 2011 Minor Contributor 1 <email>
Thanks to 2012 Minor Contributor 2 <email>
Thanks to 2012 Minor Contributor 3 <email>
<your license text goes here>
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