To put things in a different perspective -
Software is written by people. We donate our work and time to ASF, but I don't think that owning the copyright and all the rights on the code gives ASF the right to remove the author names from their work.
As for the "legal" argument that is constantly used by ASF board to justify anything - if signing on the code I write exposes me to legal risks, I am willing to take them. There are plenty of open source projects where developers keep both attribution and copyright on their code. If ASF lawyers consider that non-anonymous code is threatening the foundation - perhaps it needs better lawyers.
Letting fear to drive an open source project is IMO a very bad management.
Costin
Dirk-Willem van Gulik wrote:
On Mar 15, 2004, at 11:49 PM, Conor MacNeill wrote:
As a result, I would like to open a discussion on the ant-dev list to see the
impact of this change in policy, particularly on non-committers - i.e. the
people who make the odd, but important, contribution to the project, people
who may become stronger contributors in the longer term.
(recycling an older cocoon post with some edits)
One way to look at this is that @author tags are in a way factually 'wrong'; in most cases it just signals which person wrote the first skeleton of that code; but subsequently it was fixes, peer-reviewed and looked at by a whole community. Also do not forget the many people in your community which help with QA, Documentation, user-feedback and so on.
To put one person in the (hot) seat for what is essentially a group effort
is perhaps not quite right.
Secondly what we 'sell' as the ASF brand is a code base which is peer reviewed, quality controlled and created by a sustainable group which will survive the coming and going of volunteers. One where knowledge is generally shared and not just depended on one single individual. This is one of the key reasons why large companies, governments, etc have a lot less qualms about using apache than using most other open source; we mitigate the worry that it depends on a single person, and can implode or fork without warning, right from the get-go.
Finally - a lot of developers do live in countries where you can get sued. The ASF can provide a certain level of protection; but this is based on the KEY premisse that there is oversight and peer review. That what we ship is a _community_ product; and that everything is backed by the community and cannot be attributed to a single person. Every commit gets peer review; ever release requires +1s' and are backed by the community as a whole. @author tags are by necessity incomplete and thus portrait the situation inaccurately. Any hint or suggestion that parts of the code are not a community product makes defence more complex and expensive. We do not want to temp anyone - but rather present a clean picture with no blemishes or easy targets.
And to give this a positive slant; be -proud- of this culture; be proud of being part of something larger of incredible quality. Each of you did not just write a few pesky lines of code surrounded by an @author tag; but where instrumental in getting the -whole- thing work ! And if you are ever trying to understand why cocoon made it this far, and other commercial/open-source projects did not, then do look there; quality and a sense of long term stability.
Now the above is not normative - it is just some background, some food for thought and sets a few boundaries[1]. However the ASF has many different communities - and each is responsible for their own code, their own working habits and their own slant on ASF culture. So if for example people here feel strongly that, say, people doing Docs, Translations, QA, release management or bug fixing should be more celebrated then go for it !
Take Care, Have fun,
Dw
1: One of the hard boundaries is (to repeat from above) that the
ASF release procedure is based on the KEY premisse that there
is oversight and peer review. That what we ship is a foundation product; and
that everything is backed by the committers, that CLA or software
grants are on file, that every commit gets peer review; that releases
requires +1s' and are backed by a community process which
leaves a paper trail in CVS and on the archived mailing lists.
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