Re: your ridiculous "some animals are more equal than others" claptrap: the reason I gave Google its own line in the license file rather than adding it to CONTRIBUTORS like all of the other copyright holders (myself included) is because Google is not actually a code author, it is a legal entity which happens to own copyright to some of the contributions made by one of the contributors.
The English-language text reads:
Copyright (c) 2009, Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)
Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc.
Putting Google in the contributors file would be inaccurate because that list is for people who have put code into the project. It is a difference in categorization and essentially I am saying "the copyright to this code is owned by these people and this corporation".
You are confused. By writing down Google's name rather than your own after the copyright symbol, you are saying that they contributed the work to the project. You are the author, and may have associated moral rights (such as the right to be identified as the author), but it's not your code. It's their code, and they've done the contributing. All you got is the pay check you were going to get anyway.
Actually, no. Contribution and copyright are two different things. In the United States, every word you write is copyright by you. However, you can assign your copy rights to another entity. This allows copyright and authorship to become disjoint, even though they start out as the same thing.
Here is an example: The Apache Software Foundation requires copyright assignment on all contributed work. Developers who contribute code must assign their copyrights to the ASF. Their name is still in the contributor list, because they are a contributor of code. However, the Apache Software Foundation is the sole copyright holder of the works.
The English-language text reads:
Copyright (c) 2009, Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)
Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc.
Putting Google in the contributors file would be inaccurate because that list is for people who have put code into the project. It is a difference in categorization and essentially I am saying "the copyright to this code is owned by these people and this corporation".