11 ms·

Please re-add original author to docs and license

260 points by selexin 7y ago

selexin 7y ago
Was browsing the Guake issue list for another reason and came across this. I'm genuinely interested to hear what people think of this situation..
- hannob 7y ago
  It's pretty clearcut: The GPL requires to keep copyright notices and author's names. They should re-add him and removing names from free software code without the consent of the original author is absolutely not okay. We may argue that with licenses that allow this (CC0, Unlicense) it would be okay, but even there I'd say credit where credit is due.
jghjghjgh 7y ago
On the other hand he hadn't commit anything in last decade and he would get credit for others work On the other hand he's an author... mixed feelings, I'd say Autor: {name} Contributed in years: 2007-2009.
- hardlianotion 7y ago
  I think the license says his name should not have been removed in the first place?
- artboomy 7y ago
  "Original author" sounds more clear. I like how rpcs3 done it with "former authors" block at https://rpcs3.net/about https://rpcs3.net/about
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  That's the usual way of doing it. When a project grows and gains more contributions you can have the AUTHORS file have a list of former major contributors and project founders, current major contributors, and a note acknowledging the dozens of occasional and drive-by contributors (who get full credit for their patches in the revision logs). His request is not unreasonable at all.
Aachen 7y ago
Assuming the license hasn't changed, under GPL it was illegal for them to remove the license. Apparently it's still in the "about" window, so maybe that is sufficient for the license, but I'm not sure about removing copyright banners in a bunch of other places...
- tastroder 7y ago
  The license file does not seem changed https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING but it did not contain his copyright notice in the first place. They seem to have had an AUTHORS file in there that according to git blame was deleted in this commit 2 years ago, possibly by erroneously including AUTHORS in .gitinclude: https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e42fad7659d8b25fdb7 https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e... Before that he was included in the AUTHORS file as "- Gabriel Falcão <gabriel@guake-terminal.org>, 2007", his name still appears in a bunch of places in the code https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&unscoped_q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&... I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing. Couldn't really hurt to just include some attribution imho, not only for him but other contributors as well. It's kind of odd looking to me that one of the two original authors raised an issue on an active looking project and seemingly nobody even bothered to respond there.
  - slavik81 7y ago
    > I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing. I found it using git blame on an old file with that notice. The commit: https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/86b1fa8a42b99cbbb75eee95531337865143afea https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/86b1fa8a42b99cbbb75eee...
  - Anthony-G 7y ago
    The git commit you linked would have required the committer to explicitly remove the `AUTHORS` file from the code-base. If a file is already being tracked, it won’t stop being tracked if a corresponding pattern is added to `.gitignore`. Removing the file in this way was most likely intentional and not erroneous.
jkh1 7y ago
Credit should always be given where credit is due. I believe this is good etiquette. This might also be required by the original license.
- anilakar 7y ago
  As far as I know, attribution rights are unalienable at least in my jurisdiction. What that means in practice in larger software projects is unclear, but removing attribution for some people while keeping it for others would be against the spirit of the law.
  - gsemet 7y ago
    There were no indent in removing or altering the history. Just a project that evolves over time, files are renamed, splitted, etc, and the list of copyright at the beginning of the file is no more relevant. The real truth is inside the git history, sadly part of this truth has been lost by the origian import, and even myself, the current maintainer, does not know it !
mikekchar 7y ago
Well, as far as I can tell, the Authors file was removed completely. In all of the files that I could find that are old enough for him to have contributed to, his copyright notice remains. 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.
- chmod775 7y ago
  The first commit on github is a 77k lines commit that appears to be a migration of the project from svn to git. So you're looking only at later commit history. The original project lived here: https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome-vte/code/commit_browser https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome-vte/code/commit_browse... He explained that and linked to that in his his issue though. Edit: Linking to the full commit history instead.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    My bad! Indeed, he does seem to be the original Author. Thanks for pointing me to the correct spot! I'm not sure how I missed that.
- bluesign 7y ago
  yeah they switched to pbr, so AUTHORS file is generated on build. Not tracked on git PS: actually original author is in AUTHORS file
  - JdeBP 7y ago
    Twice, according to https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-596500947 https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965... .
teekert 7y ago
I wonder how active the Guake maintainers really are. If you use it on Wayland, you get an error that it can't claim f12 as a key binding. This is because they use some X11 foo for their keybinding. It's easy to set a custom keybinding via Gnome which will allow you to use Guake, however, they have been ignoring requests to just allow Guake to have no binding (as far as it is aware) for some time now. A short time ago they started enforcing a keybinding, strangely. [0] [0] https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591 https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591
bigiain 7y ago
Interestingly (to me at least), I was just reading he memcached website (from another HN submission), and even though it's been completely rewritten in a different language, they still credit Brad Fitzpatrick as the original author. 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?
- selexin 7y ago
  Yeh I agree with this. Licensing and possible legalities aside, I think it’s just the right thing to do. 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.
  - spzb 7y ago
    It's been done now
  - gsemet 7y ago
    I actually not seen the issue opened 2 months ago :( I do not have many times on it and I read around half of tickets people opens, sadly this one did not :(
- Cthulhu_ 7y ago
  One reason I can think of: Egos. "Why should this guy get credit after having left the project years ago while I still work full-time on it and all I get is an entry in a generated contributors file? No fair!" 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.
  - JangoSteve 7y ago
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
Most FOSS licenses don't require attribution (although ethically it's better to do so), however, almost all requires the preservation of copyright notices, and the name of the author is always part of the notice. For example, > 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.
- bluesign 7y ago
  I think the situation here is accidental removal of AUTHORS file only. (With accidental .gitignore config) 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-596500947 https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...
thom 7y ago
If anybody reads this and decides it sounds like a nice way to summon a terminal, be aware that if you're a non-Gnome user you can use Yukuake in KDE, and the --drop-down option to the XFCE terminal. 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).
- gfalcao 7y ago
  Yakuake is what inspired Guake. I wanted to use Yakuake without needing to install libqt in my machine.
  - singlow 7y ago
    Maybe, but the original inspiration was the tilde shortcut for opening the console in the Quake game, hence the names.
    - jawr 7y ago
      I think he knows why it’s called that :)
      - singlow 7y ago
        Ha - first time I read it I didn't pick up that he was the author :P
- teekert 7y ago
  There is also tilda, can be enable in Ubuntu Mate with 1 click!
- skykooler 7y ago
  Tilix also has a "Quake Terminal" mode.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  That is a nice way to summon a terminal! I wish kitty supported it.
gfalcao 7y ago
Hello, I'm Gabriel, the original author of Guake. 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 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 commit 8973af85108c889f7dc16af2d8443d0f8ff3ec05 Author: guake_root <guake_root> Date: Wed Aug 1 02:35:20 2007 +0000 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.
chrisan 7y ago
Looks like they wanted to auto generate instead of maintain by hand the AUTHORS file.
sequoia 7y ago
This seems like a non-story. Original author says "please add my name back," current maintainers say "OK will do." What am I missing?
- sebazzz 7y ago
  This is probably posted as a "discussion piece" on HN. The same like years old news or Wikipedia articles are submitted.
  - bootloop 7y ago
    It was posted before anyone else then the author commented on the github issue.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Well, I got that little piece of history from the Gabriel Falcao about how it was all formed which is really neat so that makes it worthwhile. I think we usually expect these to be someone's cry for help but here it's just an interesting tale. I liked it. EDIT: Responding here due to rate-limit, I think you're right (on reflection) and I don't like what that means.
  - sequoia 7y ago
    Agreed; it was quite interesting. I only posted my above comment because calling this thread to the attention of hackernews seemed a bit like trying to stir up controversy.
- MichaelDickens 7y ago
  For what it's worth, the author was not reinstated until after this had already been posted to Hacker News.
mixmastamyk 7y ago
Interesting to see this here, I just started using guake a few weeks ago since it supports hyperlinks in the terminal where mate-terminal does not.

260 points by selexin 7y ago

Was browsing the Guake issue list for another reason and came across this. I'm genuinely interested to hear what people think of this situation..

hannob 7y ago
It's pretty clearcut: The GPL requires to keep copyright notices and author's names. They should re-add him and removing names from free software code without the consent of the original author is absolutely not okay. We may argue that with licenses that allow this (CC0, Unlicense) it would be okay, but even there I'd say credit where credit is due.

jghjghjgh 7y ago

On the other hand he hadn't commit anything in last decade and he would get credit for others work On the other hand he's an author... mixed feelings, I'd say Autor: {name} Contributed in years: 2007-2009.

hardlianotion 7y ago
I think the license says his name should not have been removed in the first place?
artboomy 7y ago
"Original author" sounds more clear. I like how rpcs3 done it with "former authors" block at https://rpcs3.net/about https://rpcs3.net/about
Freak_NL 7y ago
That's the usual way of doing it. When a project grows and gains more contributions you can have the AUTHORS file have a list of former major contributors and project founders, current major contributors, and a note acknowledging the dozens of occasional and drive-by contributors (who get full credit for their patches in the revision logs). His request is not unreasonable at all.

Aachen 7y ago

Assuming the license hasn't changed, under GPL it was illegal for them to remove the license. Apparently it's still in the "about" window, so maybe that is sufficient for the license, but I'm not sure about removing copyright banners in a bunch of other places...

tastroder 7y ago
The license file does not seem changed https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING https://github.com/Guake/guake/blob/master/COPYING but it did not contain his copyright notice in the first place. They seem to have had an AUTHORS file in there that according to git blame was deleted in this commit 2 years ago, possibly by erroneously including AUTHORS in .gitinclude: https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e42fad7659d8b25fdb7 https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/089d72aab3c1708ed3476e... Before that he was included in the AUTHORS file as "- Gabriel Falcão <gabriel@guake-terminal.org>, 2007", his name still appears in a bunch of places in the code https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&unscoped_q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o https://github.com/Guake/guake/search?q=Gabriel+Falc%C3%A3o&... I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing. Couldn't really hurt to just include some attribution imho, not only for him but other contributors as well. It's kind of odd looking to me that one of the two original authors raised an issue on an active looking project and seemingly nobody even bothered to respond there.
- slavik81 7y ago
  > I'm not really sure how to find the diff that switched from explicit copyright headers in source files to "Guake authors", maybe that was just done as the default while the code was growing. I found it using git blame on an old file with that notice. The commit: https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/86b1fa8a42b99cbbb75eee95531337865143afea https://github.com/Guake/guake/commit/86b1fa8a42b99cbbb75eee...
- Anthony-G 7y ago
  The git commit you linked would have required the committer to explicitly remove the `AUTHORS` file from the code-base. If a file is already being tracked, it won’t stop being tracked if a corresponding pattern is added to `.gitignore`. Removing the file in this way was most likely intentional and not erroneous.

jkh1 7y ago

Credit should always be given where credit is due. I believe this is good etiquette. This might also be required by the original license.

anilakar 7y ago
As far as I know, attribution rights are unalienable at least in my jurisdiction. What that means in practice in larger software projects is unclear, but removing attribution for some people while keeping it for others would be against the spirit of the law.
- gsemet 7y ago
  There were no indent in removing or altering the history. Just a project that evolves over time, files are renamed, splitted, etc, and the list of copyright at the beginning of the file is no more relevant. The real truth is inside the git history, sadly part of this truth has been lost by the origian import, and even myself, the current maintainer, does not know it !

mikekchar 7y ago

Well, as far as I can tell, the Authors file was removed completely. In all of the files that I could find that are old enough for him to have contributed to, his copyright notice remains. 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.

chmod775 7y ago
The first commit on github is a 77k lines commit that appears to be a migration of the project from svn to git. So you're looking only at later commit history. The original project lived here: https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome-vte/code/commit_browser https://sourceforge.net/p/guake-gnome-vte/code/commit_browse... He explained that and linked to that in his his issue though. Edit: Linking to the full commit history instead.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  My bad! Indeed, he does seem to be the original Author. Thanks for pointing me to the correct spot! I'm not sure how I missed that.
bluesign 7y ago
yeah they switched to pbr, so AUTHORS file is generated on build. Not tracked on git PS: actually original author is in AUTHORS file
- JdeBP 7y ago
  Twice, according to https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-596500947 https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965... .

teekert 7y ago

I wonder how active the Guake maintainers really are. If you use it on Wayland, you get an error that it can't claim f12 as a key binding. This is because they use some X11 foo for their keybinding. It's easy to set a custom keybinding via Gnome which will allow you to use Guake, however, they have been ignoring requests to just allow Guake to have no binding (as far as it is aware) for some time now. A short time ago they started enforcing a keybinding, strangely. [0] [0] https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591 https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1591

bigiain 7y ago

Interestingly (to me at least), I was just reading he memcached website (from another HN submission), and even though it's been completely rewritten in a different language, they still credit Brad Fitzpatrick as the original author. 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?

selexin 7y ago
Yeh I agree with this. Licensing and possible legalities aside, I think it’s just the right thing to do. 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.
- spzb 7y ago
  It's been done now
- gsemet 7y ago
  I actually not seen the issue opened 2 months ago :( I do not have many times on it and I read around half of tickets people opens, sadly this one did not :(
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
One reason I can think of: Egos. "Why should this guy get credit after having left the project years ago while I still work full-time on it and all I get is an entry in a generated contributors file? No fair!" 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.
- JangoSteve 7y ago

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

Most FOSS licenses don't require attribution (although ethically it's better to do so), however, almost all requires the preservation of copyright notices, and the name of the author is always part of the notice. For example, > 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.

bluesign 7y ago
I think the situation here is accidental removal of AUTHORS file only. (With accidental .gitignore config) 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-596500947 https://github.com/Guake/guake/issues/1703#issuecomment-5965...

thom 7y ago

If anybody reads this and decides it sounds like a nice way to summon a terminal, be aware that if you're a non-Gnome user you can use Yukuake in KDE, and the --drop-down option to the XFCE terminal. 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).

gfalcao 7y ago
Yakuake is what inspired Guake. I wanted to use Yakuake without needing to install libqt in my machine.
- singlow 7y ago
  Maybe, but the original inspiration was the tilde shortcut for opening the console in the Quake game, hence the names.
  - jawr 7y ago
    I think he knows why it’s called that :)
    - singlow 7y ago
      Ha - first time I read it I didn't pick up that he was the author :P
teekert 7y ago
There is also tilda, can be enable in Ubuntu Mate with 1 click!
skykooler 7y ago
Tilix also has a "Quake Terminal" mode.
StavrosK 7y ago
That is a nice way to summon a terminal! I wish kitty supported it.

gfalcao 7y ago

Hello, I'm Gabriel, the original author of Guake. 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 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 commit 8973af85108c889f7dc16af2d8443d0f8ff3ec05 Author: guake_root <guake_root> Date: Wed Aug 1 02:35:20 2007 +0000 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.

chrisan 7y ago

Looks like they wanted to auto generate instead of maintain by hand the AUTHORS file.

sequoia 7y ago

This seems like a non-story. Original author says "please add my name back," current maintainers say "OK will do." What am I missing?

sebazzz 7y ago
This is probably posted as a "discussion piece" on HN. The same like years old news or Wikipedia articles are submitted.
- bootloop 7y ago
  It was posted before anyone else then the author commented on the github issue.
scarejunba 7y ago
Well, I got that little piece of history from the Gabriel Falcao about how it was all formed which is really neat so that makes it worthwhile. I think we usually expect these to be someone's cry for help but here it's just an interesting tale. I liked it. EDIT: Responding here due to rate-limit, I think you're right (on reflection) and I don't like what that means.
- sequoia 7y ago
  Agreed; it was quite interesting. I only posted my above comment because calling this thread to the attention of hackernews seemed a bit like trying to stir up controversy.
MichaelDickens 7y ago
For what it's worth, the author was not reinstated until after this had already been posted to Hacker News.

mixmastamyk 7y ago

Interesting to see this here, I just started using guake a few weeks ago since it supports hyperlinks in the terminal where mate-terminal does not.