Ted Husted wrote:
On 5/9/07, Martin van den Bemt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Author tags imply ownership, commits don't.
Yes. The legal theory is that when we commit the code, we are
accepting the donation on behalf of the ASF. Sometimes we are
accepting a donation that we ourself might have created. Other times,
we are accepting a donation that someone else might have created. But,
in either case, we are merely accepting the donation on behalf of the
ASF. The Foundation becomes an owner of the material, and the
Foundation is the responsible party when the code is distributed to
the general public. One concern is that the author tag implies that we
did not just donate the material, but that we intend to be a co-owner
of this copy of the material, and we become jointly responsible for
the code when it is distributed to the general public.
Ted,
This whole line, that there is some confusion about ownership vs.
authorship, is just nonsense of a very high order. If you look at the
code in the JDK, you will see @author tags all over the place. Only in
very rare cases are Java programmers who look at the code also lawyers,
but I do not believe any of them are confused about ownership vs.
authorship in this context. Everybody knows that Sun legally owns the
code. And everybody can see -- because the @author tags make it clear --
that most of the code in java.util.concurrent, for example, was written
by Doug Lea. And they do not confuse those 2 things.
I believe it is safe to say that NOBODY is confused about this.
As for whatever legal hazards you are hypothesizing about, I am not a
lawyer. However, I know that Sun Microsystems is a Fortune 500 company
that has the resources to hire top-knotch lawyers. They are also, like
any such tech company, quite zealous about protecting their intellectual
property. Given this, I conclude that, if there really was issue at all
with @author tags actually causing confusion about this being their
property, then I just have to believe that Sun would not allow them.
Therefore, as best I can determine, this whole thing is a complete and
utter ersatz problem. It does not constitute a credible motivation for
removing the author tags. The real reasons for wanting to do this must
be different than the ones stated.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
HTH, Ted.
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