hepabolu wrote:
Berin Loritsch wrote:
Torsten Curdt wrote:
So either remove them or don't. But giving credit besides the
community credits does not make much sense to me.
*shrug*
You know, I still get people emailing me about some code that I wrote
well over two years ago just because my name is in the author tags.
More importantly: do you like that or do you find that a nuisance?
Sorry, thought that was obvious: after 8 years, you don't even
remembering writing that code, helping them is obviously out of the
picture. But more important, sometimes you remember where you put that
code when you coded it, but then that projects dies, gets refactored,
and thanks to OSS licenses lives somewhere else. Normally, your code
ends up be so different that you can't help them even if you wanted to.
Since it's a crime, nobody takes down @author tags.... meaning that your
email address will live forever associated with a piece of code that
over time might not even have a single line of your code anymore.
@author tags are good for one thing only: massaging the ego of the
programmer, here is my contribution and here is how I pay myself back,
by placing the @author tag.
I know this because this is how I started contributing to open source, I
felt great to tell them to grep for my email address inside a piece of
code they were using and find the "owe" in their faces.
Now this "grep for owe" factor, although childlish, is incredibly
important and no matter what we do, we must not lose it.
The "grep for owe" factor is only second to the "grep | wc -l for owe"
factor, which means that the more files you touched, the more your name
appears.
For this project, I had it in the license so my "grep | wc -l for owe"
factor was growing even without me doing anything ;-) Smart ass, aren't
I? ;-)
Seriously, I think the "grep for owe" factor should be there for anybody
that contributed anything, including companies and including people that
donate something that is not code (like documentation or marketing
efforts). And I also think that the "grep | wc -l for owe" factor should
be 1 for everybody no matter how big their contribution is, as to avoid
racing for it.
So, in short, credits.txt is the place and we can reconstruct the
chronological order of contributions thru SVN and bugzilla.
--
Stefano.
