-----Original Message----- > From: David Nalley [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2012 8:32 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [DOC] Updating Author List File > > On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 5:15 AM, Wido den Hollander <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 10/09/2012 08:13 AM, Radhika Puthiyetath wrote: > >> > >> Hello Community, > >> > >> We are in the process of updating the Author List for the ASFCS 4.0 > >> documentation. > >> > >> Request all the amazing documentation contributors to share their > >> name and email id. > >> > >> As promised, your name will be displayed in the contributors list in > >> the documentation. > >> > >> Thank you again for all your enthusiasm and hard work towards getting > >> the documentation ready for ASFC 4.0. > >> > > > > While I get the idea, isn't the documentation something that comes > > from the Apache Software Foundation? (Remember the CLA?) > > > > As a group we are contributing to the project as a group, the > > CloudStack brings out a new release, not the individual members. > > > > So I'm not sure that we should mention the individual contributors to > > the documentation, I don't think so. > > > > Wido > > > Exactly - we've already removed many names from source code and docs. > While we appreciate individuals work it does become unmaintainable over > time, and we are doing this as a community working together. > Radhika you do have a file named Author_Group - and you'll notice (unless > someone has recently changed things) that the author is "Apache CloudStack". > > If you need to track who contributed it, our revision control system has a > wonderful functionality called 'git blame' which is far more accurate than > an authors file will ever be. > > Plus there is a policy against this, see: > https://www.apache.org/dev/apply-license.html#contributor-copyright > > --David >
David, It doesn't look to me as if that policy applies. We're not adding individual copyrights, just a "thank you for contributing" acknowledgment. I'm all in favor of the idea of giving doc contributors some public applause for their efforts. As Radhika said, it's mainly intended to encourage further contribution. I don't worry too much about the issue of maintaining an accurate Acknowledgments list in the future. Anyone who needs an exhaustive view of the contributors should look in the commit log, as others have noted. Radhika is suggesting something more informal. If we don't want to change the Author_List, meaning we want to keep the official doc author as "Apache CloudStack," then we could add some language to the abstract or some other intro text. Either an "Acknowledgments" section, or just "We'd like to thank the following documentation contributors for their help on version 4.0 of this documentation: ..." . Jessica T. CloudStack Tech Pubs
