Some additional questions from authors

What if someone alters my software in such a way that my good name is harmed? A general condition in the licence covering moral rights should protect you against this. However, you might have a particular reason for asserting a stronger right over a part of your work (for example, you might write a tutorial, and think that if it were edited incompetently, your teaching skills would be unjustly called into question). The IPL allows you to restrict alterations to non-program components to the insertion of references to supplementary material; this prevents your work from being edited invisibly.

The licence lets us criticise commercial operators who welch on their obligations, but what if they sue? There's some pretty strong stuff in the licence to dissuade them from that action, but naturally we can never guarantee anything in this world. Don't be defamatory. If you mean to say "I think you stink for not paying so-and-so an extra $50", then say that, don't say "you're starving the widows and orphans."

What if another author adds a few lines to my software and claims an outrageous contribution in the AUTHORS file? The intention of the IPL is that we're doing this with a primarily non-commercial mindset. There is a clause preventing you from suing the other author unless they are also a commercial user or distributor. Either let the matter slide or, if the other author's contribution is grossly less than their claim, contact them and suggest they change their entry. If that fails, remove their work and their claim and reprogram the functionality yourself.

What general guidelines do you suggest for adding to the AUTHORS file? I suggest not bothering unless you have made more than a trivial contribution. Copyright law in most countries says that small changes to a copyright work are subsumed under the copyright of the author of the whole work, and although this is not a question about copyright, the same principle is useful. If you just fix an odd bug or add half a dozen lines, it is probably simpler to just give it away than to make it harder for businesses wishing to pay royalties. But if you have added a complete file or entire new functions, then put a comment on them showing your authorship, count the lines of code involved, and add a line to the AUTHORS file.

What if I contribute a GIF or a database? It doesn't consist of lines. Every forty bytes is deemed to constitute a line.

I worked very hard on that C function, but so-and-so whipped up a GIF ten times bigger in a few minutes; gratitude payments won't be fair. There are two types of code: 'premium' and 'discount'. Things that are only created by the sweat of the brow, such as hand-written C code, are premium, but stuff that can be churned out, such as GIFS (which are much larger in bytes than the effort expended in making them would indicate) or code generated by a form designer, are discount. For the sake of some semblance of fairness, premium code is rated as ten times more valuable than discount code. This is all necessarily inexact, but we should be doing all this with an expansive, magnanimous frame of mind, and over a lifetime, we can hope that any errors will roughly cancel out.