[Bf-committers] Visibility of attribution

[Alex Fraser]

Hi Ton,

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ton Roosendaal" <ton at blender.org>
> 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.

Dalai's reply is great. However if you think the contributor agreement will be drawn up soon, I would rather wait for that. I would feel more comfortable if there was a formal agreement in place.

> 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.

My personal opinion is that a requirement for copyright assignment would hinder contributions. But maybe it can be decided on a case-by-case basis.

> [...]
> 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.

That sounds good! Please consider my proposals (below) for the format and location of the attribution.

Cheers,
Alex

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



> On 21 Jun, 2011, at 4:52, Alex Fraser wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> > 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.