[Ctk-developers] License versus copyright and authorship

[Stephen Aylward]

Hi Luis,

Really good point.    "Author" is a poor term - maybe we should go
with "Original Contributor" or such.

The goal is to give credit to the person/institute/toolkit that gets
the ball rolling.   CTK is a wonderful grassroots effort, without
funding.  It would be nice to acknowledge the contributions that are
being made - those who are taking the initiative to make it succeed.

Maybe we should limit such credits to a wiki page, but frankly I've
found the wiki pages that attempt to do that to be extremely
misleading - they begin to reflect politics and spark ownership issues
rather than reflecting the real effort and basis of success.

Any suggestions on how to achieve the goal of recognizing who is
really doing the work and making the contributions?  I'd really like
to see credit given to DCMTK, MITK, Slicer, etc as well as the
developers .

Thanks,
Stephen

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 5:30 PM, Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 4:47 PM, Stephen Aylward
> <stephen.aylward at kitware.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> One point of clarification - I still strongly believe that CTK code
>> should clearly indicate who are its authors/contributors.   That is,
>> if some of the code came from Slicer, it should indicate it.  If some
>> of it came from MITK, it should indicate it.  If J2 wrote it, it
>> should indicate it.
>>
>> Thanks to use of the Apache 2.0 license, we can independently credit
>> authorship and list other copyright owners when appropriate.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Stephen
>>
>> --
>>
>> ==============================
>> Stephen R. Aylward, Ph.D.
>> Director of Medical Imaging Research
>> Kitware, Inc. - North Carolina Office
>> http://www.kitware.com
>> stephen.aylward (Skype)
>> (919) 969-6990 x300
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ctk-developers mailing list
>> Ctk-developers at commontk.org
>> http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ctk-developers
>>
> -------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Stephen,
>
> Crediting initial author(s) is feasible in the first commit of a
> file, but it becomes impractical as the maintenance of that
> file is done over time by other developers (as it should be
> the case in an open source project where wide participation
> is encouraged).
>
> On day #1, one can clearly say that File X is authored by
> developer M, but 1,000 days later, that file is only 75% by
> developer M, and now it is also 12% by developer Q,
> 9% by developers R,..... 0.1% by developer Z...
>
> The Statistical Reports generated by the revision control
> system are better suited for keeping track of authorship
> and credits.
>
> Over time, the file is a joint work of authorship of over a
> dozen people (and their employers...).
>
> Here is for example the "git blame"
> summary of "itkImage.h"
>
>      67 Hans Johnson
>     49 Will Schroeder
>     37 Jim Miller
>     32 Luis Ibanez
>     20 Brad King
>     13 Paul Hughett
>      9 Karthik Krishnan
>      9 GaA«tan Lehmann
>      9 Bill Lorensen
>      6 Arnaud Gelas
>      4 Mark Foskey
>      3 Jisung Kim
>      3 David Cole
>      1 Vikram Chalana
>      1 Bill Hoffman
>
>
> The first column is number of lines of code
> touched by the developer in the second
> column.
>
> This is the outcome of
> 11 years of development.
>
> and this is still incomplete, since it only
> shows the authors who modified the
> lines of code for the last time.
>
> Tools like gitstat can regularly extract
> this information if needed.
>
> For example:
> http://public.kitware.com/pub/itk/gitstat/ITK-2011-05-09/index.html
>
> developers (and their employers) only hold
> the copyright of the modifications that they
> apply to a file, and only when they are over
> the level of functional code, that merits to
> be considered a work of authorship (think
> of a a work of art...).  For example, a for loop
> to count a number of elements, is below the
> level of being copyrightable.
>
>
>     Luis
>



-- 

==============================
Stephen R. Aylward, Ph.D.
Director of Medical Imaging Research
Kitware, Inc. - North Carolina Office
http://www.kitware.com
stephen.aylward (Skype)
(919) 969-6990 x300