I don't see that either. But if some of the top Apache guys feel, believe or know otherwise, that's good enough for me.
Know what? This has become a recreation of illusions and delusions. This is like Franz Kafka's book The Trial. There are vague and unsubstantiated reasons for changing the entire attribution structure of the open source community. This is not good thinking.
If the only purpose of the tags is to feature contributor names in a prominent place - namely the source code - then the real question becomes whether we can achieve this goal in some other way with reasonable effort.
This is NOT the only goal. That is not even close to accurate.
Concerning the CVS log, you have to be aware that the committer is not always the contributor. A contributor may put a patch in bugzilla, which is then comitted by someone else.
Well, in the paranoid sort of talk we are having, then the "committer" becomes subject to these imagined but unreal legal assaults. Indeed, where an "author" is hidden, the Foundation would become liable for a "conspiracy" of hiding the real culprits. This is all silly from a legal standpoint.
In general, I don't believe that the removal of author tags is to disguise from where the code came. Rather, some people may be afraid to find their name in the author tag of code which has no longer anything to do with what they actually contributed long ago.
This is yet another reason? This is also not right. The @author tags keep track of rather than obscure people's relation to existing code. The destruction of this useful device will create rather than solve anything akin to this imagined problem.
Then it would become their problem to dig through the CVS logs, bugzilla, and the mailing list archives to prove that they are *not* the author.
To whom? This is just imaginary. This is Alice in Wonderland thinking.
Love yah, Roland, but this is not your shining hour. Really, there is no legal difficulty, but this recommendation might create one. Microsoft could not have come up with a better way to screw up the code.
