Reuben Thomas wrote: > On 4 May 2011 10:37, Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> wrote: >> >> Copyright is covered by the notice at the top of every file. >> Authorship is another story. I've seen no reason to add the name >> of every "author" to each source file that's affected (and am >> strongly inclined never to do that). >> That is meta data and belongs in the logs, not in the sources. >> >> Besides, users of gnulib will need to know authorship of an >> individual file no more than we need to know who contributed >> to glibc's stdio-common/vprintf.c. > > In that case why is anyone's name in any file header? Shouldn't they all be > FSF?
Are you asking about authorship or copyright? Most files are Copyright... by the FSF. A rare few have individual or some corporation's name there. It is not uncommon for the original author to add a "written by ..." comment near the top. IMHO, there is nothing wrong with that. It's the original author's choice. However, adding a new name anywhere in source files for each new author who contributes a copyright-significant change would not be worth the trouble.
