@author tags; help or harm?
September 10th, 2004 by HenA subject that has come up from time to time at Apache is whether the Java projects should use @author tags or not. The ASF Board currently recommends that no @author tags should exist, but does not enforce such a thing. Their reasoning is firstly on legal advice, and secondly based on occasions when @author management has become a childish practice.
The working practice was that if you made a notable change to a class, you add yourself to the list of @authors at the top. It’s a practice I’ve rarely followed to be honest as I think I rate notable change at a much higher level. My belief is that @author shows the person(s) who are the designers/owners of the code, not just coders.
Personally I’m fine with the ASF recommendation as humility is good for people, but it does mean I’ll someday (if recommendation applied) have to spend more time explaining to people that I have no clue about lang.builder.StringBuilder 