Missing historical author attributions vs GPL compliance

[lidel]

LICENSE (GPL 3.0) states (cc @sk4zuzu who noticed this):

    b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or
    author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal
    Notices displayed by works containing it; [..]

At the same time author attributions were lost during migration ansible → ansible.posix:

• from: ansible/ansible@829eb0f
• to: 6f92862

I am not a lawyer, so I would appreciate if someone familiar with licensing nuances address the licensing concern: won't this loss of author attribution become a problem for any company that wants to use Ansible AND comply with GPL?

[gundalow]

@lidel Thank you for raising this, we will do some research and report back

[kirelagin]

The section you are quoting from is called “Additional Terms” and is a list of additional restrictions/requirements that can be added to the GPL in a specific case. If the author of the code did not explicitly request author attributions to be preserved, then they don’t need to be preserved, namely:

If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you
must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the
additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating
where to find the applicable terms.

It is, of course, a good idea to verify that no one added such a term to their contribution, but, realistically, people usually don’t do this.

Furthermore, the standard way to do “author attributions” is in the form of copyright statements in file headers, not metadata in git commits, which can be easily lost (as in this case) or modified due to history rewrites, etc. So, even if someone added such an additional restriction, chances are they also recorded their authorship information in that same source code next to the statement of the additional terms.