[vtk-developers] thanks field deleted

[Ken Martin]

> Hello developers,
>
> [light-hearted grumbling follows]
>
> I notice that most of the thanks fields have been deleted,
> presumably by
> the copyright update. Where's the gratitude...I ask you.
> Bad enough we
> should have to sign away the copyright on all our hard work...

Maybe other people disagree, but I really don't have a problem with
you putting your copyright on a submitted class as long as it is no
more restrictive than the standard VTK copyright. We will add our
copyright onto the class as well since we distribute it as a package.
I'm not a lawyer so I'm not sure what adding your copyright actually
changes other than it must stay in the file.

Regarding the Thanks: item we need to be consistent. If we are going
to reference the contributors to a class then we should do that for
all classes and all contributors (beyond simple one line changes).
There is probably a quick perl/tcsh script that could do a cvs log on
all classes in VTK and find out who modified more than X lines in the
cxx/h files for a class and then add those people to the list of
contributors for that class. I know Kitware amd GE people like Berk,
Amy, Lisa, Charles, Brad, Jim, Bill H, etc have contributed a lot to
VTK and generally received little credit. And many other contributors
like David, Yves, Tim, John, Prabu etc, have received little or no
credit for the work they have put in. This way it can be automatically
generated and kept up to date. Maybe a

//.SECTION Created by (original author)
//.SECTION Contributors (in order of totalLinesAdded +
0.5*totalLinesSubtracted) for all contributors beyond X lines where X
is maybe 5? 10?

Opinions
Ken