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

Mailmaps

When an author changes his/her commit name or email, that author will appear multiple times in the authorship report.

To reduce that noise, add a standard .mailmap file to the root of your git repository.

.mailmap

Proper Name <[email protected]>
<[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Proper Name <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Proper Name <[email protected]> Commit Name <[email protected]>

Ignore Revs

Automated tools (e.g. linters/formatters) which change many lines can lead to authorship being attributed to the individual who ran the tool instead of the original author.

However, if you identify the formatting commits and list their full commit SHAs in a file, Git Authorship can correctly attribute the original author. The default file is .git-blame-ignore-revs, placed at the root of the repository.

.git-blame-ignore-revs

# Run automated formatter
9c6927b59791eb71cce0a84d8c88fa14d5235fa8

# Run automated linter
ba09bf70676fb13891d15236951450b2f1aa9f3b

You can specify an alternate location via the --ignore-revs-file option (resolved relative to the repository root).

git-authorship REPO_URL --ignore-revs-file .nonstandard-ignore-revs-file

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 (resolved relative to your current working directory)

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 (resolved relative to your current working directory)

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.