wtsi-ic / wtsi-software-policy

WSI Software Policy

wsi-software-policy

WSI software policy and boilerplate headers.

How to use boilerplate headers

1. Clone the git repository, either from Github or from the internal git server (e.g. git clone git:/repos/git/ic/wtsi-software-policy.git).
2. Change to the boilerplate directory (e.g. cd wtsi-software-policy/boilerplate)
3. Type make to build boilerplate headers for a variety of languages (sed is required to be in the path for this step)
4. Copy the appropriate header into your project and customise as required.

wtsi-software-policy's Issues

No-one currently at Sanger is a contributor for this project any more

Josh, if you happen to see this, can you make me a contributor, please?

Intended meaning of "Author: PROGRAM-AUTHOR <EMAIL>"

The prescribed boilerplates in Appendix A all include the following line:

Author: PROGRAM-AUTHOR <EMAIL>

The appendix notes that PROGRAM-AUTHOR and EMAIL should be "substitut[ed ...] as appropriate", and that "including the email address (EMAIL) is optional". The second-to-last paragraph of §1 perhaps also refers to this Author line (as emphasised):

The standard boilerplate header for each of these licenses is given in Appendix A, which in the case of LGPL, GPL and AGPL includes a link to the primary web site documenting the full license. Any of these licenses is acceptable as satisfying requirements above, so long as the copyright is assigned to Genome Research Limited and the author(s) names are given.

Searching the document for "author" suggests that the sort of substitutions that are intended to be made for PROGRAM-AUTHOR and EMAIL are not further described.

I can think of at least two possibilities for what this Author line might be intended to signify:

1. The name (and optionally email address) of the particular person who did the creative work of inventing and writing the code in the particular source file. (Or where several people have contributed over time, the original author or the author of the majority of the code or perhaps several authors.) This would serve as a form of academic credit --- similarly to authorship on papers, and potentially useful to the individual for the advancement of their career --- and perhaps also relate to the idea of moral rights in European copyright tradition.
2. To provide a contact name and address, so that the eventual recipients of the code can contact the maintainers of the program. For example, this might be a group or helpdesk address, to maintain a point of contact when the original individual contributor has moved on.

(The email address being optional would seem to make (2) a less likely interpretation. And perhaps there are other possibilities...)

It would be useful if the document explained how this Author line is to be used. Some questions that an explanation would ideally provide answers for are:

• Whether PROGRAM-AUTHOR is to be the name of an individual person
• The circumstances under which it would be appropriate to remove an Author line and PROGRAM-AUTHOR from a source file (perhaps when the entire contents of the file have been substantially replaced by new code)
• The circumstances under which it would be appropriate to add a new PROGRAM-AUTHOR to a source file (perhaps when a new individual has added substantial new code)
• Whether there should ever be more than one PROGRAM-AUTHOR in a single source file's boilerplate --- §1's penultimate paragraph's "author(s) names" suggests that there may be, but the appendix gives no examples of how this should be formatted.