[Bf-committers] Visibility of attribution

[Alex Fraser]

Hi all,

When doing some work for a client recently, I developed a patch for Blender. The client is happy to contribute the code back to Blender, however they are concerned about attribution.

Currently it seems there are no clear guidelines about how attribution is given for contributions. My preference, and that of my client, is that detailed copyright notices should be visible both in the code and in Blender's GUI. This is not unusual: consider the Linux kernel (e.g. [1]) and the GIMP (e.g. [2-4]), and the About dialog boxes of gedit[5] and Firefox[6].

Apart from giving contributors credit, detailed copyright notices in the code would better satisfy the GPL, which states in section 2.a:

    a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
    stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.


I propose that:

 1. All future contributions be attributed in modified source files as "Copyright <year> <author or organistion>", or at the contributor's option, in another form that conveys the same information.

 2. The same copyright information be collected in a place accessible from the GUI, either in the splash screen itself (perhaps in a tab) or on a web page linked to from the splash screen.

What do you think?

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
Alex Fraser
Software Engineer
The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

[1] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob_plain;f=kernel/cgroup.c
[2] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/plain/plug-ins/common/polar-coords.c
[3] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/plug-ins/twain/twain.h
[4] http://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/libgimp/gimpitemcombobox.c
[5] http://www.pasteall.org/pic/13959
[6] http://www.pasteall.org/pic/13961