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

On 23/08/10 21:23, Ben Bucksch wrote:
> 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.

That list is not supposed to be a list of everyone who has ever worked 
on Mozilla code. It's a list of people who have made a significant 
contribution to that particular release and, as such, people get added 
to it and removed from it at the end of each product cycle.

about:credits _is_ that list of everyone, and you are on it - and have 
been since Tue May 2 19:13:48 2000 PDT, over 10 years ago. A link to 
that page is the first thing you see when you click "Credits" in the 
About box of Firefox 4.

> 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.

Depending on exactly what you mean by "a credits clause", I don't think 
that's true.

The GPL3 requires the publication of appropriate copyright notices on 
the code (section 4). Apache requires their preservation (section 4.3). 
BSD requires their preservation, and placement in documentation. MIT 
requires their preservation in "the Software". The MPL 2.0 requires 
their preservation (section 3.4) and allows their addition (section 11).

No-one has a "you have to put my name in the About box" clause. The 
closest is Apache 2 section 4.4, but even that allows the NOTICE file to 
be a text file on disk, unreferenced in the UI.

Gerv