I have started contacting people who have copyrights in the main SVN. The usual case for this is when code was promoted from the contrib SVN to the main SVN and we did not change the copyright to be the Sakai Foundation.
All contributors to the Sakai Foundation code base (i.e. those with commit to the SVN) have effectively pre-agreed to allow the Sakai Foundation to have a license to those contributions. Contributors can retain their own copy with whatever license they like.
We expect that all contributions developed by Sakai committers will be committed with the Sakai Foundation copyright rather than their own. We have been somewhat lax in this and now it is time to clean this up.
Most open source communities are very strict about keeping individual names out of the source code as a form of attribution. Once something has been contributed to the commons – that contribution is no longer owned by an individual – it is owned by the commons.
This quote is from the SVN hackers guide:
“We have a tradition of not marking files with the names of individual authors (i.e., we don’t put lines like “Author: foo” or “@author foo” in a special position at the top of a source file). This is to discourage territoriality