OK here.

With github any change is linked to his/her author, thus I agree there is no need to have any author tag in our code.

Definitely should be removed.
Following the Joomla Coding standards

• @author (optional but only permitted in non-Joomla source files, for example, included third-party libraries like Geshi)

Be careful with changes like this guys and girls. Couple of issues here:

1. Removing @author tags

You can remove an @author tag but only if you ensure that the contributor his copyright is maintained correctly. By removing a copyright notice incorrectly you violate the GPL license given by the contributor and you infringe his copyright.

As per guidelines from the SFLC:

"... be careful when removing the notices of other developers. Since free software licenses require licensees to preserve notices, wrongfully removing one is a violation of the license from that contributor and may be copyright infringement. If it’s absolutely clear that every remnant of a developer’s contribution has been removed, then it is probably OK to remove the associated copyright notice; otherwise, it’s best to keep it around. However, a requirement to “preserve” or “reproduce” a developer’s copyright notice does not necessarily require that the notice be kept in exactly the same place it started; it’s usually acceptable to move notices from individual source files to a central attribution file, for example."

In this specific case, if you remove the file based copyright notice of my contribution you need to add my name to the CREDITS file for the 3.x release series. Currently my name is only mentioned for 1.5 (which is also an infringement as I did contribute to 1.6).

2. Appropriate copyright notice

A even more serious issue is that Joomla is violation the GPL of all who contributed in the past by not ensuring that all copies carry appropriate copyright notices. The GPL v2 clearly states that:

... each file should have at least the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.

Joomla, since day one, has been using centralised copyright notices. To be compliant with the GPL each file header should clearly state where the full copyright notice can be found. At present the file-scope copyright notice says the following:

• @copyright Copyright (C) 2005 - 2016 Open Source Matters, Inc. All rights reserved.
• @license GNU General Public License version 2 or later; see LICENSE.txt

This header makes no mention where the full copyright notice can be found, instead the above file-scope header makes believe that all copyrights are owned by OSM, which is not the case. I personally never assigned any of my copyrights for any of my Joomla contributions to OSM.

A correct header would be:

Copyright (C) 2005 - 2016 The Joomla Project Contributors. See the COPYRIGHT file at the top-level directory of this distribution and at http://joomla.org/COPYRIGHT.

The COPYRIGHT file would mention Open Source Matters, Inc, among the list of all the different copyright holders of the Joomla code base.

For earlier versions such a COPYRIGHT file did exist in the root and the file-scope headers did refer to it. Currently the COPYRIGHT file can be found in /installation/COPYRIGHT, while file-scope references to it have been removed.

3. Friendly request

If you make changes to someone's code contribution which has a legal impact it would be appreciated to add the contributor in question to the Github issue so he is made aware of the pending change and be given the opportunity to ensure his copyright and license are not violated. I only found out about this change after someone pointed me here.

I hope this issue can be rectified as soon as possible with respect for all those who have contributed to Joomla in the past and for those who will be contributing in the future. For further reading : "Managing copyright information within a free software project" by the SFLC.

For private questions, feel free to email me.

Thanks for taking this into consideration.

Did you never sign the JCA?

No I have never signed the JCA. My contributions to Joomla are being made available under the GPL v2 or later license, copyrights are my own.

The copyright statement's unchanged since the initial import into source control on September 15, 2005 aside from adding inclusive dates and the format of the license line. If the wording of it, specifically assignment of copyright to OSM versus the contributors, is an issue that should have been brought up at some point in the past (especially given your status with the 1.5 release) or be directed to (what's left of) OSM directly. It has also been operating procedure for quite some time (at least as long as I've been involved with the project) to not use @author doc block comments specifically for reasons like this (the original file was essentially a fork from Composer's loader and Nic placed his name in the author slot, you then made large revisions to the file and removed his name placing your own instead, which basically removed author history for the code in question).

As to the CREDITS file, that is a legitimate issue and honestly that file has gone untouched since before 3.0's release. Anyone's welcome to sort it out if they want to crawl through history (especially while SVN was still in use and commits weren't directly attributed to authors).