Let me clarify the whole story:

In 2006 I had just gotten into college and was learning Python by myself, my English skills (also self-taught) were pretty low and I had to rely a lot on whatever material was available in Portuguese (I'm from Brazil).

In 2007 I had an amazing college teacher, the "drop of water in the desert" kind of teacher. He was trying to convince everyone that they could move from MS Windows to GNU/Linux and that the available desktop software was pretty decent.

The only catch is that he used KDE2 and all the "cool" desktop apps he was showing were built on QT, like a good pupil I always tried to pair up an equivalent GTK option to every QT app my teacher showed to the class.

That worked well for everything: Music Players, Photo Viewers, etc.

One day he showed Yakuake (https://kde.org/applications/system/org.kde.yakuake) to the class and everyone went bananas, this was such an amazing tool.

But then I did not have a good alternative for GTK if I wanted to press F12 to get a drop-down terminal I'd have to install libqt on my Debian? No way!

I set out to write an equivalent of Yakuake for GTK+ (hence the name Guake, with "G" for GTK), at the time I did not know exactly how D-Bus worked and had no idea of how to write Python extensions in C.

The very first working version of Guake was a Gnome Applet that used GTK bindings to libvte to make a terminal always available. Was still not good enough for me.

The next step was to write a regular GTK Window application and try to make it disappear, but I was having a lot of trouble binding F12 globally, it only worked well on Metacity which was the default window manager for GNOME2 at the time.

Guake's user experience was not great, it only worked well on Metacity but was good enough for me to show to my teacher, I was so excited I was able to create my very first GPL software and publish on source forge. I was ahead of everyone in my class at the time, I was learning on my own the things that would be taught only in the next semester and many things that we would never learn in class (such as Python programming).

Some months go by and Guake-Gnome-VTE (the original name) gets some visibility, and this guy Lincoln de Sousa reaches out to me, he told me he had fixed the global keybinding problem by writing a Python extension in C, also he refactored the whole code and even applied GNOME Human Interface Guidelines to it.

It sounded great to me, I was so excited that someone else was interested in Guake, and made improvements to it, I was in awe with open source.

Except for one thing: Lincoln rewrote a lot of things that were working, just for the sake of cleaning up the Python code the aesthetics of it (actually he was applying PEP8 which I had no idea what was before this)

I had these mixed feelings: in one Guake had become what I wanted it to be, the global keybinding worked anywhere, the UI looked even better and the code was a lot easier to understand.

On the other a lot of the code I had written was deleted, I was not a skilled python developer when I wrote the first version of Guake, so I had spent several hours reading, coding and trying things out.

Anyways, the whole thing was a win-win, yay open source, now Guake had 2 maintainers putting a lot of time and love into it.

After some time Lincoln proposed that we moved the code off of Sourceforge to a git repository, self-hosted (we had a very "purist" mentality regarding FOSS and were terrified of having our code hosted by a proprietary software such as Github), he had way more experience than me on pretty much everything and he took reins: the code was hosted in one of his servers and all I did was pay for the domain.

In retrospect, I wish I had just pushed the code to Github at the time, so no the commit history would be lost. The irony in having a purist FOSS mentality: the code was hosted on a server that I eventually lost access to.

Also, instead of importing all the commit history from Sourceforge we just pushed the code to git.

You can look at the first commits on github:

commit 4f4ab35d5cb2363dd464e6b252d1c798bd01c2fb Author: Lincoln de Sousa <lincoln@minaslivre.org> Date: Sat Oct 6 13:56:50 2007 -0300

    patch came from svn

The "guake_root" commit swallowed all the history of the original code I had done.

In 2008 I moved out of my city to work for a big corporation in Rio de Janeiro, there my FOSS purism slowly evolved into tolerance for proprietary software, eventually, I even got an iPhone and a MacBook.

That's when I stopped contributing to Guake: I had moved to MacOSX and the project had been taken over by other maintainers. But even the icon is still the one I design on Inkscape, Guake was my first open-source software, I put a lot of time and love into it.

Today 14 years later I seldom use Guake because I seldom use a Linux Desktop, but I must confess that seeing my original authorship vanish from the project is very sad.

No reason not to. Anyone arguing otherwise is being petty and mean in my opinion. Sure, a bunch of new people have written some/most/all of the current codebase. But they built on top of the project founder's code. Why _wouldn't_ you give them the credit for that?

I usually have it bound to Ctrl-` and find it very convenient (also someone satisfying to just show and hide for no reason other than I like the animation).

In his own branch, the first commit is October 2007 and the vast majority of commits after that are from Lincoln de Sousa. So I don't think anyone was doing anything untoward here. I'm not really familiar with the project, but it doesn't appear to me that he was ever the original author. If anything, it appears as though Lincoln de Sousa did most of the heavy lifting and he was a regular contributor. I could easily be wrong, but that's my impression.

Still, acknowledgement as being an original contributor in the README seems completely reasonable and the issue has 14 thumbs up.

[0] https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591

> Copyright (C) $years $author

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person [...] subject to the following conditions:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

And usually, the copyright notices appear in the beginning of all files for clarity.

Although some projects with too many developers may agree to use alternative attribution and copyright identification methods, such as git "Sign-Off", an author file, or SPDX machine-readable license notice. In these cases, it's considered a common practice to use a collective name in the copyright notice, such as

> // Copyright 2019 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.

But in most cases, it's a bad idea to remove any name from the header.

---

In the Guake's case, the copyright notice is changed to,

> Copyright (C) 2007-2013 Guake authors

with the original name removed. On one hand, the use of a collective name is common, it's not too different from Chromium, or other major projects. In a sense, it's acceptable, as long as the method of author identification is clearly defined (e.g. git sign-off). Anyone contributes the project is assumed to have accepted how attribution is done implicitly.

However, the problem is that the original name is removed - changing the notice retroactively should be done with the permission of the author, which is clearly not obtained here. A common practice in such circumstance is leaving the original copyright year and author in place, and appending new copyright information below (or above) the original notice, so it should be something like this,

> Copyright (C) 2007 Gabriel Falcão

> Copyright (C) 2008-2013 Guake authors

This example is generally considered "good" since (1) credit is given where credit is due, (2) it also shows the copyright holders responsible for the project in different period of time.

For example, the copyright notice of Python is,

> Copyright (c) 2001-2019 Python Software Foundation.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 2000 BeOpen.com.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

> All Rights Reserved.

> Copyright (c) 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam.

> All Rights Reserved.

On the other hand he's an author...

mixed feelings, I'd say

Autor: {name} Contributed in years: 2007-2009.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

In this specific case there seems to be no argument that the original author is who he says he is and he has given specific reasons why it would be in his advantage to be credited as the original author I can't imagine many people denying him that.

The issue seems to be getting a bit of attention now (when I posted there was 9 thumbs up, now there is 173 and a PR on the readme), so hopefully the current maintainers (re)visit the issue and give him his slice of credit.

(Disclaimer: I was an early, minor, contributor. It looks like the second commit mentioning me was to fix a bug introduced by my first one, whoops.)

[1] https://github.com/memcached/memcached/tree/32f382b605b4565b...

I mean the OP (Gabriel) hints at wanting to use it in his CV (proverbially); wouldn't anyone that made a significant contribution? Then of course, how would you define significant?

It's a can of worms and one of the ways around it is to reduce all contributors to "you are not special" status.

I think legally, (also ethically)

Copyright (C) 2007-2013 Guake authors

Should be fine as long as they keep his name in authors file.

Edit: Actually they switched to pbr [1] , so AUTHORS file is generated on build. Not tracked on git. Original author is in AUTHORS file

[1] https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...