On Dec 28, 2003, at 10:39 PM, Phil Steitz wrote:
The subject of @author tags has been discussed on and off here and
elsewhere with no apparent consensus. In a recent post to general@, Ted
Husted pointed to this post
<http://tinyurl.com/yrlhu>
by Greg Stein to community at apache.org, which raises some disturbing
legal and community issues around the use of @author tags. I am convinced by his arguments that we should eliminate @author tags uniformly once we clean up the web site and get the process of updating and publishing contributor lists routinized (read: complete the mavenization of the j-c web site).
I'm not sure I buy the legal argument, as our CVS logs are public also, and it's easy to figure out who did what in a piece of questionable code. So you haven't really don't anything by removing the author tag - the author is still easily discoverable.
I think author tags are good as some/many/all people are proud to have their name on things that they work hard on and contribute. I'll be the first to admit the sense of pride that I felt when contributing something for the first time, and seeing my name on it.
The valid point (IMO) I've heard in favor of removing them is that not having them can help the sense of group ownership and community.
if I had to decide, as long as there is no additional liability in having the tag in the code, I'd be for letting people/components/etc choose to do what they feel is right.
geir
I assume that this needs to be decided for each of the components
separately. With that in mind, I would like to start by removing/omitting
@author tags from [uid] and I would like to propose that we pull them out
of [collections] and [lang] as and when we complete mavenization of the
websites for these components (or otherwise publish a full and up-to-date
contributors list).
Now would be a good time to act on [collections], since we are about to cut a release. So...what do we think about pulling out the @author tags from [collections] and pushing out the maven site with 3.0? If we want to hold off on the mavenization until we have worked out the larger j-c site issues, we can just add a "contributors" page to the existing site to acknowledge contributors. If others are in favor, I will volunteer to grep out the @authors and do this.
Phil
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