> How many files have you updated the autorship information? If the answer is zero, then I'm still of the idea that the best place where to find the information about who touched the file is version control

This information, however incomplete, is not (but should be) part of our **distribution**. As in, the files we distribute through our website and update-sites. Unless we release our whole git repo (and we won't), any kind of authorship info is inaccessible to somebody with just our tarballs. 

Moreover, authorship information can **not** be derived in anywhere near a complete manner from our VC system. The comments you see there contain `$Id`, which means these files were created on something older than git, from which we have *of course* not extracted all authorship info. To wit:

    huitseeker➜~/Scala/scala-ide(master)» git log --format='%aN' | sort -u|grep Clendenen
    
    huitseeker➜~/Scala/scala-ide(master)»  

Woops ... Tim is not in the metadata. As is common in OC projects! I don't know of other examples in the scala-ide repo, but for another example, read [this comment](https://github.com/scala/scala/blob/master/src/library/scala/util/hashing/MurmurHash3.scala#L191) in scala's util/hashing : @Ichoran is in comments, but not in the metadata.

Removing this line is a good way to make authorship data easier to get *wrong*.

I agree the current status of our authorship data is incomplete. As you say :
> There are people that should rightfully have their name in the authorship information (if we decide to keep them), but they currently don't.

The right way to go about making this better is **not** to remove authorship information from our files. **On the contrary**. 

Correct but not complete authorship, messy authorship, is better than none at all.  Authorship is an "add-only" kind of data, is easier to maintain, and hence is not covered by the instinct we ave about code (which is to  minimize the amount of it).