Indeed, last vote about 6-8 months ago was to
deprecate the @author tags, and that rule is still on
our web site. We'll need a revote to allow them. As
a committer, I personally have never bothered with
@author tags, but I do like how they show outside
developer and corporate contributions to our project.
The Batik team has some 1800 attributions of various developers, Xalan checks in with about 650. Cocoon seems to use them as well. (Those are the only projects I've checked, I don't know how Jakarta is.)
After layout and properties are done--I would be
thrilled if some companies, liking our product, decide
to donate us specific renderers--maybe HP would have a
team do a PCL renderer for us, IBM another. Or maybe
a bright small company wants to advertise its skills. If they want to have their names on an @author tag, that's a very cheap price for us to pay.
Before we put on a lawyer hat and declare that @author tags threaten to take precedence over the Apache license--let's take this issue to the ASF for guidance. (After all, they might have legal aspects, and they have drawbacks in that they can get messy if overused.) As far as I can tell from the other projects though, @author tags are still kosher.
Dirk-Willem, does Apache have any position on @author
tags or other author attributions in source files? See below for examples.
Thanks, Glen
[1] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-fop/src/org/apache/fop/render/awt/Attic/AWTRenderer.java?rev=1.45&view=auto
[2] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-fop/src/java/org/apache/fop/render/rtf/RTFHandler.java?rev=1.13&view=auto
[3] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-batik/sources/org/apache/batik/parser/AWTPolylineProducer.java?rev=1.3&view=auto
[4] http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/cocoon-2.1/src/java/org/apache/cocoon/reading/ImageReader.java?rev=1.4&view=auto
--- "J.Pietschmann" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
removed "former contributor" section in favor of going back to giving credit
within source files.
Uh, oh. That's not supposed to be a change anybody can make on a whim.
J.Pietschmann
Again, I'm sorry I didn't contribute to this debate earlier.
There is no conflict between the ownership of the copyright and the authorship. Last I heard, most of the copyright in the Beatles catalogue was owned by Michael Jackson. He gets the money, while Lennon and McCartney (and Harrison and Starr) get the credit.
It seems to me that a major motivation for writing OSS is precisely the recognition. When alt-design is completed, I will probably have written the bulk of it, as well as designing it, and I have no intention of removing my @author tags. Why should they be removed in favour of a mailing-list address?
In respect of multiple @author tags, Sun says only that they should be added in chronological order, with (it follows) the author of the class first. They add: 'In these days of the community process when development of new APIs is an open, joint effort, the JSR can be consider the author for new packages at the package level. For example, the new package java.nio has "@author JSR-51 Expert Group" at the package level. Then individual programmers can be assigned to @author at the class level.'
I would expect that any significant addition (from a new, or completely rewritten method) or significant accumulation of minor fixes, rates a mention in the source, and on the web page. Apart from the warm inner glow, what other reward is there?
Peter -- Peter B. West <http://www.powerup.com.au/~pbwest/resume.html>
