Re: @author tags

[Dan Christopherson]

I think that "owner" is intended in the sense of "the primary person 
responsible for maintaining", not in the sense of the legel owner.

The programmer is only very rarely the legal owner of his work.

Jeff Dever wrote:

Very nice quote.  But the owner of HttpClient (and all jakarta project 
code) is *very* clear.  The owner is the Apache Software Foundation 
(ASF).  The individual contributor has contributed the code, and does 
need to be recognized, but when a commit is made that code no longer 
belongs to them.  It belongs to the ASF.

So to follow the "Pragmatic Programmer", only the ASF should be listed 
as the owner, which makes @author tags useless, and confusing from a 
legal perspective.  The copyright statement at the top of every source 
file attributes ownership to the ASF.  Removal of the @author tags is 
supposed to help protect those listed as @authors legal entanglements, 
and to empower the PMC.

Removing the @author tags does make sense.  The only thing that I am 
disappointed about is that there has been no suitable replacement 
recognition mechanism agreed upon.  But its still being disucssed by the 
PMC.

-jsd

Roland Weber wrote:

That's exactly the problem:
"not necessarily who edited the file last, but the owner"
There are people who see a chance to contribute an
enhancement or bug fix. We'd like to have them listed
as someone who contributed, but *without* the
responsibility of being the owner of the code.
cheers,
 Roland




"Chris Lamprecht" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
11.03.2004 09:54
Please respond to "Commons HttpClient Project"
       To:     "Commons HttpClient Project" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
       cc:        Subject:        Re: @author tags

I'm currently reading _The Pragmatic Programmer_, and I just came 
across the
following in a section entitled "Comments in Code" on page 250:

"One of the most important pieces of information that should appear in 
the
source file is the author's name -- not necessarily who edited the file
last, but the owner.  Attaching responsibility and accountability to 
source
code does wonders in keeping people honest ..."



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