Crediting tidyverse authors' contributons

[kdpsingh]

I want to make 2 changes to the Tidier.jl package and each of the sub packages.

1. Add the authors from the tidyverse packages' licenses to each of our licenses.

2. Update each of the READMEs and documentation pages to specifically acknowledge the contributions of the authors of the package whose APIs we are implementing.

We did item 1 for TidierText but I want to make sure we do both for each package.

@rdboyes @drizk1 @jdiaz97, let me know if you have any concerns or questions. If not, I'm happy to put together the PRs to ensure the language is consistent across our packages.

[kdpsingh]

Just for awareness, I came across this blog post: https://www.practicalsignificance.com/posts/hanukkah-of-data-5784/

"Of course, the data manipulation at the end is almost identical to the equivalent R code, since I used the Tidier package (which is a partial copy of the Tidyverse). That’s nice for useRs like me, although it’s troubling that the Julia package completely borrowed the user interface from the R packages without crediting the R package authors as co-authors of the user interface."

While I think we pretty explicitly state what the source of inspiration was for each of the packages, I think we could do a better job of acknowledging the authors' contributions to our work.

[rdboyes]

I certainly have no problem giving credit to the original authors of the tidyverse packages, but we should probably ask them if they want that credit first - having them as authors on this project implies endorsement (at least potentially)

[kdpsingh]

Per what I've read about MIT license, you don't need to ask before you include people -- it's enough that you used existing work as a starting point for new work. In this case, the tidyverse packages don't actually include people's names. The copyright for dplyr belongs to the "dplyr authors" and so on, so it's fairly straightforward.

For the credit piece, I think we could make clear that we express our gratitude without it appearing to be an endorsement. We could either do this without naming specific people, or if we do name people we would name Hadley Wickham given his outsized contributions.

[rdboyes]

That makes sense to me - personally I think it's already pretty clear all over the pages that the packages are building on tidyverse, so if all we're doing is making that explicit, I don't think there's any problem with crediting the "dplyr authors" - I was more concerned about crediting individuals

[drizk1]

I'm not sure what the norms are for other reimplementation packages on Julia or elsewhere, nor I do I have much familiarity w the license, but I felt it was implied that their authors inspired Tidier.

Perhaps linking to their packages when they are mentioned would allow users to immediately see the respective authors? Versus an acknowledgement statement somewhere?

But I'm ok with anything that's gives them their flowers