Re: No ICLA for some authors in Sun's JAXP 1.3 donation

Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:

>
> On Apr 12, 2005, at 10:20 PM, Jeff Suttor wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 07:33 -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
>>
>>> What I would do is just remove the names from the code, and in the
>>> commit message, note that you are removing as they are internal Sun
>>> committers, that their work was done at Sun before the contribution was
>>> made, and you are removing them to eliminate the confusion that arose.
>>
>>
>> I would prefer that my @author stay intact.
>> I have just sent in an ICLA.
>
>
> It doesn't matter for this case - the existence of the author tags 
> reflects work that happened before the software was donated to Apache, 
> so from a legal standpoint, it's moot.  I know this may come across as 
> harsh, and I don't mean to be - the use of author tags is a community 
> issue (and a generally contentious one!)  and one that the ASF board 
> has recommended against.  However it is up to the individual project 
> to decide how author tags are handled.
>
My opinion would be not to remove the author tag. Author tag shows the 
contribution of a person and is a good contact point in case any one 
needs to clarifiy certain behavior. Actually it would be good if Jeff 
can be made a committer as part of the code grant because of his 
contribution in so many files. His becoming committer  would also be 
good for the ASF project and the community.

- Neeraj

> Personally, I'd find it utterly baffling to find an author tag in the 
> file with no related commit by that author.  An alternative to just 
> erasing them, in order to preserve that information  in some way, 
> would be to move it to the NOTICE file for the project?
>
> An alternative also is to contribute to the project and become a 
> committer.  you do have the paperwork done :)
>