Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/06/28/gilligans-island.html

Famously,
the Gilligan’s
Island theme song, in its first season, left out mentioning
the Professor and Mary Ann characters by name, simply including
…And the Rest in that lyric where their names later
were heard. Mystery Science Theater 3000 even spoofed this issue
during
screening of This Island Earth, in which the
actor Russell
Johnson (The Professor) appeared. When Johnson first appears on
screen while viewing This Island Earth, MST3K’s Mike says
over the film: Hey, what’s this …And the Rest
Crap!?!. Indeed, what’s that all about?

Anyone would get easily annoyed if they’ve contributed some work but,
when credit is giving, they were just relegated into … and the
rest. Anyone who is thrown into that group would assume their contribution
is somehow also not important,
or that the contributions of the credited are somehow better.

Some Free Software projects websites, however, often relegate many of their
contributors to being And the Rest, just like The Professor and
Mary Ann in their first season of Gilligan’s Island. This is a mistake that ought to be
addressed when it occurs.

The example of this problem that was recently brought to my attention
was on Fedora Project’s website.
At the bottom of all of the pages of Fedora’s website,
there’s © 2011 Red Hat, Inc. and others. I’ve dubbed this a
“Gilligan’s Island copyright notice” because, while Red Hat
is probably a copyright holder some of Fedora, Red Hat employees are
also fond of pointing out how many contributors they have from outside
Red Hat. Yet, with regard to the website, those contributors aren’t
considered important enough to appear in the copyright notice. They’re
secondary characters that Red Hat is indicating don’t matter that much:
like The Professor and Mary Ann in Gilligan’s Island‘s first
season.

However, the solution for this problem isn’t completely clear.
Obviously, listing all the copyright holders at the bottom of every web
page is completely unreasonable. In projects themselves, we usually
have a CREDITS or COPYRIGHT file that has everyone’s notice collected,
but rarely is every copyright notice put in the single files of the project. Perhaps
website could do the same. Certainly, Gilligan’s Island copyright
notices can’t continue; they relegate everyone but the main entity into a
supporting character role, when in fact, in Free Software projects,
everyone should be equal.

I’ve been discussing
discussing this issue
on identi.ca lately with Richard Fontana of Red Hat, and
he’s started
a thread on Fedora list about this. I hope that it gets resolved
soon, and I’m grateful to Fontana for addressing this issue.

It’s worth noting that a few examples of other distributions, such
as Debian, Arch
Linux, and Ubuntu, are even worse
in this regard, because they list only a few authors (or a single
corporate entity) that may or may not have all the copyright on the
project and the website; they don’t do the minimal … and the Rest. For example, Debian’s copyright notice
says: Copyright © 1997-2011 SPI. Such notices
are even worse than Gilligan’s Island Copyright Notices,
because they fail to even acknowledge at all that a diversity of
contributors are present and hold copyrights. Note that
there’s
a long-standing
Debian bug on this issue (and the related issue of poor licensing of
the site).

I suppose Gilligan’s Island Copyright Notices are better than marking
the work as an organization’s own when in fact there has been no
assignment of copyright. Still, I think Free Software projects should
take more care on this issue. As is noted in
the GNOME
Foundation Guidelines on Copyright Assignment (which I co-authored),
many developers want to see their “name in lights” under the
copyright notice when they contribute to a project. It’s important that
we give them that opportunity.