Fair point. ASF is the legal owner, not the "maintainer". But @author tags do not help in identifying the maintainer at all for many reasons.
A maintainer really implies one place or person for contact. A running list of @author tags, some current some ancient, do not satisfy this. The only real maintainer is the project itself: in this case all of HttpClient. Questions as to maintainance should *always* be directed to the mailing list, not to individuals. I think that the only real value to @author tags (in OSS) is to associate recognition to the programmer, which is valuable in itself but can be satisfied in other ways that don't have legal/clarity problems. The trick is to find a mechanism that is ubiquitous, easy and powerful for providing recognition without the other problems. And hopefully this could be standardized for all of Jakarta. -jsd Dan Christopherson wrote: > 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 >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
