Re: notification requirements [was Re: MPL Alpha 1 Draft Released]

  On 23.08.2010 15:50, Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> I understand that people who create software really want to be 
> acknowledged: it feels good to know that your code is part of 
> products, and it looks good to family, friends, and potential employers.


> But the associated costs are that people who do release software have 
> to either have to maintain drastic change-control practices in order 
> to keep the MPL credits list up to date

I've done it myself, when I released Beonex. You just need to gather the 
Initial Developer and Contributor lines, and basically run sort|uniq on 
them. You'll get a few dups with " Inc" vs. ", Inc" etc., but that's 
easily fixed in script or source. It can be automated. I created and ran 
a few scripts myself.

> Leave "credit" to the community

Unfortunately, community failed. For example, although I work for and on 
and around Mozilla full-time since over 10 years, and am an Initial 
Developer, e.g. of netwerk/ code, and there's a long list of people 
scrolled by in Firefox About, I am not among them. Now, you may argue I 
should not be in the list. Community can fail.

I do not want to rely on the project owner de jour to decide whether he 
thinks my authorship is relevant or his own contributions are more 
important. I think that's an understandable concern.

In general, I think the authors of the code must be prominently credited 
towards end-users, no matter who creates the UI or binary, be it Firefox 
or Google Chrome based on Gecko - that's why most open-source licenses 
*do* have a credits clause.

I am happy with the MPL 1.1 clause, I think it was very well formulated 
as-is, and I don't see why I should give up my guaranteed rights.

Ben