git-authorship 0.4.0

Interactive reports showing who wrote each line of code in your git repository.

Git-Authorship

Interactive reports showing who wrote each line of code in your git repository.

pip install git-authorship

git-authorship https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY

# Open build/authorship.html in a web browser

Why?

Copyright is a thing, and whoever wrote the code in your repository holds an exclusive copyright over it unless an agreement has been made otherwise.

While git-authorship does not help with managing copyright agreements from contributors (see cla-assistant and its corresponding GitHub Action for that functionality), it does help you clearly identify who your contributors are and the exact lines of code they wrote.

To support libraries undergoing re-licensing, git-authorship includes config files for labelling the licenses under which contributors have shared their code.

Other Features

Author Licenses

You can include OSS licensing information for each author via a .csv file. The author-name will be matched to the values shown in the generated authorship report.

licensing.csv

author-name,license-SPDX-id

_{A list of SPDX license identifiers can be found at spdx.org/licenses}

Then tell the CLI about the authorship file

git-authorship REPO_URL --author-licenses licensing.csv

Pseudonyms

If certain files are being attributed to an unexpected author (e.g. if a contributor copied code from another project, the blame would show the contributor instead of the original author), you can manually override the blame and licensing information.

pseudonyms.csv

target-path,actual-author,license-SPDX-id

_{A list of SPDX license identifiers can be found at spdx.org/licenses}

[!NOTE] target-path can refer to either a specific file or an entire folder which will be attributed to actual-author under the named software license.

Then tell the CLI about the pseudonyms file

git-authorship REPO_URL --pseudonyms pseudonyms.csv

License

Copyright (c) 2022-2024 Joseph Hale, All Rights Reserved

Provided under the terms of the Mozilla Public License, version 2.0

What does the MPL-2.0 license allow/require?

TL;DR

You can use files from this project in both open source and proprietary applications, provided you include the above attribution. However, if you modify any code in this project, or copy blocks of it into your own code, you must publicly share the resulting files (note, not your whole program) under the MPL-2.0. The best way to do this is via a Pull Request back into this project.

If you have any other questions, you may also find Mozilla's official FAQ for the MPL-2.0 license insightful.

If you dislike this license, you can contact me about negotiating a paid contract with different terms.

Disclaimer: This TL;DR is just a summary. All legal questions regarding usage of this project must be handled according to the official terms specified in the LICENSE file.

Why the MPL-2.0 license?

I believe that an open-source software license should ensure that code can be used everywhere.

Strict copyleft licenses, like the GPL family of licenses, fail to fulfill that vision because they only permit code to be used in other GPL-licensed projects. Permissive licenses, like the MIT and Apache licenses, allow code to be used everywhere but fail to prevent proprietary or GPL-licensed projects from limiting access to any improvements they make.

In contrast, the MPL-2.0 license allows code to be used in any software project, while ensuring that any improvements remain available for everyone.