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+# List of AUTHORS who contributed over time to the AzerothCore project
+
+## Warning
+The code of AzerothCore is shipped as it is without any form of warranty,
+and - except for third party libraries licensed under the AGPL 3,
+which you can read from the file "LICENSE".
+
+## 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.