Declaring copyright in a FOSS project with major and minor contributors

Question

I'm working on a FOSS project where I am the main contributor. In each source file I have a copyright and license statement at the top of the file. The copyright notice names me as copyright holder. From time to time I get contributions by other developers. Sometimes these contributions add new files and sometimes they just change existing files.

What is, in FOSS world, the usual or recommended practice to declare copyright with regard to minor contributors? I can think of those options:

• Just mention the major contributors in the copyright notice and add minor contributors to a THANKS or a CONTRIBUTORS file.
• Just mention the major contributors in the copyright notice and add minor contributors as (additional) authors in the source files they created or changed.
• Add minor contributors to the copyright holders in each file they've changed or created.

Thanks in advance for some hints.

Answer 1

I would assign the copyright to "Its contributors" and provide a list of all contributors (separated by major and minor if you wish) in a separate file. It also allows you to properly attribute contributors who do not directly commit code to the project.

Your source control system should keep track of who commits what changes, and for most projects it really shouldn't be that important anyway. On an open source project especially, it is the end product that matters, and not the line-by-line contributions.

Answer 2

IANAL - I'm not a lawyer. For legal advice, consult a lawyer.

Make sure you are using an appropriate open source licence.

Look at what respected projects do - Apache, GCC, PHP, Tcl.

I'd suggest noting individual copyright holders in the files that they contributed modifications to. Where they contributed the file and you subsequently made changes, list them as the original copyright holder and add yourself as one of the secondary copyright holders. The company I work for uses either '© Copyright 2009 CompanyName' or '© Copyright 2001,2009 CompanyName' (with just a first year and most recent year of change; it does not use compound lists of years such as 1996-8,2000,2003-6) to identify copyright in source code. You could have a similar line for each contributor. Also, you have to worry about code set with the '©' as the UTF-8 representation is different (2 bytes) from the ISO 8859-1 representation. GNU recommends using '(C)' as a surrogate for '©'.

I think, though, that this suggestion is fussier than the bigger projects (such as those above) use.

You should look at how GNU and the FSF handles this; they require (or used to require) that all the contributors of software project attribute the copyright to the FSF, to avoid any possibility of contention. The maintainers guide says what they expect.