Developers Mailing List
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Please do not take offence BUT...
Is it possible to limit the traffic on the developers alias to specific code
issues only. Subjects such as 'adding someone as a contributor' or 'theft
of authorship' are only directly relevant to the contributors themselves
(Noted: This e-mail is not talking about code).
Regards,
Stuart
-----Original Message-----
From: Ceki Gulcu [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 5:00 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Theft of authorship
At 01:24 08.06.2001 -0700, Craig R. McClanahan wrote:
>I think this is really a significant question. How significant a patch
>does it take for someone to legitimately be considered an additional
>"author" of a particular source file? Attribution in a CVS commit should
>always be there -- but is that really enough.
>
>Unfortunately, I don't have time at the moment to come up with ideas for a
>document describing reasonable policies for making such a decision -- but
>it would be useful to have such a thing (i.e. I vote +0 :-).
The rule I use is to be liberal when granting authorship but extremely
conservative in removing authorship.
Ten lines of new code turns a contributor to an author for the relevant
file. In some rather rare cases, small (< 5 lines) but insightful changes
can have a big impact. Consequently they merit authorship and even committer
status.
In principle, authorship can never be removed regardless of how much one
changes the original code. After 65 iterations it might well be the case
that not one single lines survives from the original code. That still does
not justify the removal of the original author's name.
On the other hand, authorship is not viral. If someone creates a new class
extending a class that I wrote, that does not make me an author of the
extending class.
I religiously follow these rules and expect everyone else in the log4j
community to do the same. Regards, Ceki
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