[Ctk-developers] License versus copyright and authorship

[Bill Lorensen]

I think contributions should be credited to communities and not individuals.

ITK, VTK, NA-MIC, DCMTK, MITK, CITK, ...

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 6:22 PM, Stephen Aylward
<stephen.aylward at kitware.com> wrote:
> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Ctk-developers mailing list
> Ctk-developers at commontk.org
> http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ctk-developers
>