Best Way To Thank Non-Copyrightable Helps

[OĞUZHAN TOPALOĞLU <og...@std.yildiz.edu.tr>]

Hello everyone, I have my own Java math library called Tephrium. Recently, I have been learning about some random number generation stuff and and coding my own implementations of them (splitmix64 etc).

A friend of mine is very interested in RNGs and knows a lot of stuff so I talked with him through out the entire feature creation process.

My friend didnt write any code for me so technically speaking he does not hold any copyright over Tephrium's contents. But he did teach me a lot of things and explained many standard operations in the industry. He also sent me a lot of articles for me to read and learn how to do things properly.

I would like to mention him in my library somehow but I don't really know what is the best way to do this. I have an AUTHORS file in my repo to list copyright holders (both project owners and contributors). But that file contains people who have copyrightable things. I was thinking about creating a "SPECIAL_THANKS" file and mention him there like this:

"""
The following people are **NOT** copyright holders of Tephrium but they have helped in various ways:

John Doe - <jo...@gmail.com>:
      - did this
      - did that
      - did these blabla
"""

But I'm not sure if this is the best way to do this. Any suggestions or ASF recommendations for this? (I'm asking this here because Tephrium is Apache-2.0 licensed)


Best regards, Oğuzhan