1. For non-committers, it gives us warm fuzzies. It's like a little flag that says I actually made my contribution to open source, like more of us out there should. You can't go in CVS and see that people like me added a patch, unless a committer actually takes time to actually mention it without an author tag. If there were some template text, like "Based on a patch contributed to ASF by [EMAIL PROTECTED] related to bugzilla # ....." in the CVS log I think that would be good enough.
Even though I've had a VERY VERY minor contribution, it was quite a rush to have an author tag on a minor support file. It made me feel like a part of the project and it made me want to get more involved. [I'm getting into unit testing, so I figure I might make contributions there first down the line.] I would never want to cause any resentment against those doing the brunt of the work or claim that I'm on the same level. At the same time, it's nice to have a little reminder somewhere that I'm making a contribution, however small.
2. There should be some tracking for the origins of code in case we ever get attacked by a company like SCO. Maybe there's already some cross referencing system that I'm not aware of between bugzilla and CVS that already takes care of this. I guess this is counter to legal protection under the ASF umbrella. Let's say I work at Top Secret Corp or Run By Lawyers Inc. and I submit a patch that my employer would see as infringing code. It's good code and one of committers (David Graham for instance, since I'm replying to his message) commits it into CVS. It now looks like David was the source for the code and when Top Secret Corp lawyers started sniffing around it'd be harder to find out the true source. I would guess this might end up being a major issue depending on how the SCO law suit ends.
Paul Sundling
David Graham wrote:
The @author javadoc tag topic has been discussed on commons-dev recently and Ted brought it up in a recent struts-dev thread so I thought it might be nice to get the Struts community's opinion on it. Some arguments against @author tags by Greg Stein can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/yrlhu
I'm not too concerned about the legal issues because I don't think there are any. I think it's a good idea to remove all of the tags rather than each person removing their own so that the remaining tags don't misrepresent who did most of the work (kind of an all or nothing deal).
Comments?
David
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