I think every contribution which has been made so far is the copyright of the person who wrote it since there has not been a waiver agreement. You could add a waiver agreement requirement before being able to submit code, but it wouldn’t have any effect on all of the older contributions and even if it didn’t have any chilling effect the difficulty of changing the license of the whole sourcecode would still be an issue. I’m afraid we can’t bypass law to avoid difficulties.
I also don’t think for this case there’s any reason to differentiate between attribution and copyright. I don’t think anyone has submitted someone else’s code and anyone who has submitted code is both the copyright holder and the author.
Again, I think this is best to ask somewhere where there are people with the correct legal knowledge.
Personally I don’t think this is an issue for most contributors. I think most of them think just because they don’t have a copyright notice in their submitted code they are giving away their copyright holder rights, but that’s not the case.
I also don’t see anyone suing CMU or Disney over this either.
Assuming I’m wrong on all the legal points and putting them aside, I am in favor of attribution. I personally find it wrong to mention Disney and CMU only. I have two reasons for this:
- Disney and CMU have pretty much abandoned the project. CMU I think has been teaching its students Unity for a while. Not everyone checks github to see how much the project is still being developed by 3rd parties.
- Because why not, honestly? If you want to turn this into a community project, what’s so difficult in making the community feel more engaged and appreciated by giving attribution, instead of making them feel like Disney and CMU are taking all the credit for everyone’s work, like some kind of bosses whom you have never met with.
It’s seems like a waste of time, but you have to make people feel a part of a community if you want to build a strong community.
I wouldn’t say this would have any significant effect on Panda. I think the lack of contributors is a result of lack of some basic features for a current gen engine, good demos, tutorials, advertisement and community interaction (blog posts now and then about some technical details is interesting for me personally, but I’m talking about reddit, facebook, twitter…).
But that doesn’t mean this point doesn’t deserve attention and has no effect.