[Bf-committers] Visibility of attribution

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi Alex,

Dalai's reply is excellent, hope you can follow this for now.

For Blender we really should resolve this topic now indeed; there's a  
strong (legal) lobby in the OS world to make projects use developer  
agreements, whith good clarity about copryright origins of  
contributions and an agreement by contributors to accept on the GPL  
(or other) license.

Another relevant topic is to clearly define in which cases (c) goes to  
BF. There's sensitive development areas that can easily picked up by  
legal lizards to start IP or patent violation investigations. This is  
a reason why FSF advices to migrate rights to them. Blender has a  
fortunate legal base in the EU, giving it a bit more stable grounds  
for IP/patent attacks than in USA.

A developer agreement can also cover up for future adjustments in the  
covered license, worded in a way developers feel confident in (like  
keep it gpl compliant) but with sufficient open ends to upgrade a  
license or give out minor but relevant exceptions for extensions via  
Py or plugins.

I've mailed a while ago about this initiative: http://harmonyagreements.org/

Proposal: I'll check on this during the next 2 weeks in more detail,  
and come with a proposal for it. Will get at least feedback/ 
endorsement from the current project admins (brecht, campbell, matt e,  
martin p) on this too! We then can have the topic for public review  
here.

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

On 21 Jun, 2011, at 4:52, Alex Fraser wrote:

> 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
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