Struts is a community and as such its important to know the roles people play in that community - people need to know or be able to find out who the comitters are and, just as importantly, who they are not. If I'm discussing submitting a change to struts - knowing whether people encourging/discouraging you are committers or not makes a difference when deciding if its worth trying or not. Also, since committers have only get to that status by proving their value to this community, their opinions get more respect.
I also think acknowledgement of contributors is a positive thing - it is also good for the community and encourages participation. We can spend our lives in fear of what might happen but it has to be balanced with "what is good for the struts community". I say keep the "Who We Are" and "Contributors" pages. Niall ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Husted" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Struts Developers List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 11:46 AM Subject: Re: 1.2.0 is tagged and frozen On Mon, 23 Feb 2004 11:23:08 -0800, Paul Sundling wrote: > I should probably still remove <author> tags from the docs and > consolidate those into the volunteers page also. I'm afraid that our volunteers page is subject to the same considerations as the author tags. :( * Low hanging suit. In the unlikely event of a law suit, this is a (very) convenient list of parties to join to the action. We may think it's silly, but it is what an attorney would do. Each of these people would then be responsible for having themselves severed from the suit. (Guilty until proven innocent, I'm afraid.) The ASF would do what they could, but resources are limited; we shouldn't tempt fate. * No strings attached. An important ASF principle is that all the code and documentation belong to the Foundation and its Community. Tags and other credits tend to imply some people "own" more of the resources than others. When a resource is donated to the foundation, we need to emphasize that it belongs to the Foundation, free and clear. * Duty now for the future. ASF projects are meant to live for decades. The current list is already lengthy. What will it look like ten years from now? How much of the contributions of those we list today will really be part of the product then? Tags and lists like these cannot be sustained for the full life of an Apache product. Sadly, we should probably trim the Who We Are page down to the list of Struts Committers who are members of the Jakarta PMC, since these individuals are the legal representatives of the Foundation. In this context, the Struts Committee Members would be presented as the "decision-makers" rather than the "authors". (Technically, what we do is a "work for hire", even though we are all unpaid volunteers.) Of course, we'd still give credit where credit is due via the CVS commits, if for no other reason than to retain an audit trail. Of course, a very ambitious attorney could still try to join everyone cited in the CVS log, but the CVS events are shielded by the Committers being the actors, and so it's a horse of a different color. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
