We decided some time ago (cannot find the email threads yet) on a method to clearly thank contributors. It is important to summarise that, so that we can make clear statements about such things. Perhaps this should go in our project guidelines.
* Use Jira comments to follow up on the patch contribution. * In the SVN commit message, mention their name and also refer to the Jira Issue number and title. * In changelog (status.xml) put their name and Issue number. * Give praise on the mailing list. This is sufficient for people later searching to find who participated to produce each contribution. We deliberately remove specific names from actual source code and documentation. (See FOR-123.) There are a number of reasons for not having the author names in the sources. There is much discussion about the merits of this in various Apache mailing lists. The main reasons are: * Community building. It assists with directing all questions to the dev and user mailing lists. This enables developers to answer questions to the wider community. If there were names in the sources, then people tend to contact the author off-list. This is damaging because it exhausts the sole developer's resources and denies the rest of the community. * It is a team effort. Sure one person might come up with an idea, but it is really in the context of the project and would not have arisen otherwise. After addition of the code, the project developers will maintain and enhance it. * Legal clarity. If someone decides to legally challenge us, then they need to go to the correct information source, i.e. our SVN repository. If there were some author names in code, then they would tend to rely on that and so do not have the true history. For various reasons, the ASF Board suggested to all projects to remove authors from sources. Apache Forrest follows that recommendation. Prior to each release we scan the code to detect any license issues and any author tags. --David
