appleseed, our open source (MIT) physically-based rendering software, is used in various circles, one of them being academia.
We have been asked to obtain a DOI so that our software could be cited. We're planning to publish our releases to Zenodo.
GitHub currently lists 69 contributors on our main repository. Should we consider all of them as authors of the software, or would it be more appropriate to somehow select a subset of the contributors?
If the latter, how should we define such a subset? We have all kinds of contributors: one-time contributors, occasional contributors, regular contributors, core contributors, project owners, Google Summer of Code students, mentors... Who should we include or exclude?
Edit 1: here is a paper that seems relevant:
Smith AM, Katz DS, Niemeyer KE, FORCE11 Software Citation Working Group. 2016. Software citation principles. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e86
https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.86
Edit 2: here is a tentative publication of our latest official release to Zenodo:
https://zenodo.org/record/3384658