azerothcore-wotlk/AUTHORS

# List of AUTHORS who contributed over time to the AzerothCore project

## Point of current development
The project is currently hosted at https://www.azerothcore.org/ and developed under https://github.com/azerothcore

## History of development
Development of this project dates back to 2004, and was developed under various umbrellas over time:
* WoW Daemon Team, 2004
* MaNGOS project, 2005-2008, located at http://www.mangosproject.org
* MaNGOS project, 2008-2011, located at http://getmangos.com
* SD2 project, 2008-2009, located at http://www.scriptdev2.com/
* TrinityCore, 2008-2012, located at https://www.trinitycore.org/
* SunwellCore 2012-2016, privately developed, more info at https://www.azerothcore.org/pages/sunwell.pl/
* AzerothCore, 2016-CURRENT, located at https://www.azerothcore.org/

## Authorship of the code
Authorship is assigned for each commit within the git history, which is stored in these git repositories:
* github.com/cmangos/mangos-svn (History from MaNGOS project from 2005-2008, originally hosted at http://mangos.svn.sourceforge.net)
* github.com/TrinityCore/TrinityCore
* github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk

Unfortunately, we have no detailed information on the history of the WoWD project;
if somebody can provide information, please contact us, so that we can make this history available

SunwellCore was developed privately and has unfortunately no git history.

## Exceptions with third-party libraries
The third-party libraries have their own way of addressing authorship, and the authorship of commits importing/updating
a third-party library reflects who did the importing instead of who wrote the code within the commit.

The Authors of third-party libraries are not explicitly mentioned, and usually is possible to obtain from the files belonging to the third-party libraries.

## Cross-project collaboration

At AzerothCore, we actively promote collaboration with other MaNGOS-based open-source projects that are actively maintained. This also includes cherry-picking commits from relevant projects such as:

* TrinityCore: https://github.com/trinitycore
* CMaNGOS: https://github.com/cmangos/
* vMaNGOS: https://github.com/vmangos
* and others

It is strictly required for any contributor importing code to credit the original author by:
- linking the original PR (or commit)
- adding a [Co-authored-by](https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/committing-changes-to-your-project/creating-and-editing-commits/creating-a-commit-with-multiple-authors) line in the PR description

This will automatically include the original author in our list of [Contributors](https://github.com/azerothcore/azerothcore-wotlk/graphs/contributors).

If you notice a violation of the above, please report it to the Staff immediately.

We encourage other projects to adopt similar practices to promote healthy cross-project collaboration and proper attribution.