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License Question
Hi Tom,
I'm neither lawyer nor experienced in picking licenses, so take my response as just trying to be helpful. If someone with more experience in this area would correct me if I'm wrong, that'd be great.
As far as I understand it, most of the Open Source licenses will prevent contributers from disrupting the project because they've given their work to the project. Ohloh has a list of licenses but you may also want to look at Wikipedia's list or check the list from the Open Source Initiative to look for one.
Regarding your question about credit: The old BSD license (used by NetBSD still) has a provision that required all advertising materials to list the NetBSD organization. You could use this license and change that clauses to list your contributors. However, this clause may cause problems for some people who want to distribute your project, as described by Richard Stallman here.
Perhaps the biggest issue you'll want to consider when picking a license is whether you want to allow commercial use of your code without requiring users to disclose improvements and modification. If so, consider an liberal license like BSD, Mit, etc. On the other hand, if you would prefer that all modifications must be disclosed, consider a license like the GPL. Here are some links for further reading on this important topic:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permissivefreesoftware_licences
You could use an existing license such as the GPL or BSD and then just have a credits
file with a list of everyone who contributed to your project?
