In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Peter Donald"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>...
> I would like to remove the author tags from the rest of the code but I
> think it makes it harder to aquire a community. Many people get a buzz
> out of it and I have seen people keep contributing because of it. It

Uh... whoops. Maybe I misunderstand, but it sounds like you're saying
that people are participating in the community *because* they get to see
their name in the @author tags. That isn't right... there should be ways
to acknowledge the people in the community, but not associate them so
strongly with the source.

> also helps in the situation that code gets abandondend because you can
> always go back to original author regardless of whether it gets moved
> around in CVS.

Oh, the data is always in CVS, or maybe a CHANGES file, or somewhere. But
if the code gets abandoned, then you could always just drop it on the
floor. If it got integrated, then there is certainly a worry about how it
got there without a maintainer. Or if it *had* a maintainer, but they
left, then why aren't other developers taking responsibility to maintain
it or to jettison it.

mod_proxy was languishing *hard* in Apache 2.0. About two years ago, we
saw that nothing was happening with it except for some basic maintenance
to keep it compiling when interfaces changed. For all intents and
purposes, it only dragged us down because it caused maintenance. We
shoved the thing out into a new CVS module and removed it from the
standard Apache 2.0 distribution. Hoo boy did that light some fires!
About six months later, we had a whole new mod_proxy after a bunch of
people worked to get it up to snuff and back over the bar. It is now back
in Apache 2.0 standard and being released.

All this without author tags. We didn't send the proxy module back to the
original author (whoever that may have been, they obviously weren't
interested). Removing the abandoned/unmaintained code was the best thing
for it.

Cheers,
-g

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