Date: October 12, 2008 9:29:18 PM CEDT
Subject: food for thoughts :)
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Date: October 12, 2008 9:29:16 PM CEDT
Subject: food for thoughts :)
http://producingoss.com/
p 129
At the Apache Software foundation we discourage the use of author tags in source
code. There are various reasons for this, apart from the legal ramifications. Collabor-
ative development is about working on projects as a group and caring for the project
as a group. Giving credit is good, and should be done, but in a way that does not al-
low for false attribution, even by implication. There is no clear line for when to add or
remove an author tag. Do you add your name when you change a comment? When
you put in a one-line fix? Do you remove other author tags when you refactor the code
and it looks 95% different? What do you do about people who go about touching every
file, changing just enough to make the virtual author tag quota, so that their name will
be everywhere?
There are better ways to give credit, and our preference is to use those. From a tech-
nical standpoint author tags are unnecessary; if you wish to find out who wrote a par-
ticular piece of code, the version control system can be consulted to figure that out.
Author tags also tend to get out of date. Do you really wish to be contacted in private
about a piece of code you wrote five years ago and were glad to have forgotten?