WordPress: Remove link from author name in Recent comments

In the Recent comments section, the author name is linked to his/her website while the actual comment title is linked to the comment page. Lot of times, site visitors click on the author name instead of comment title - thinking THAT is the comment link. They end up on the author's website instead.
So we decided to de-link (or unlink) the author name. Here's what we did:

1. We changed 2 files in the wp-includes folder: default-widgets.php and comment-template.php

2. In comment-template file, we made a copy of the function: get_comment_author_link, and pasted it as a new function: get_comment_author_name. The new function has following code:

function get_comment_author_name( $comment_ID = 0 ) {
$author = get_comment_author($comment_ID);

$return = $author;
return apply_filters('get_comment_author_link', $return);
}

3. In default-widgets file, we located the function widget() and replaced the get_comment_author_link call with get_comment_author_name as below:

foreach ( (array) $comments as $comment)
 {
$output .=  '

' . /* translators: comments widget: 1: comment author, 2: post link */ sprintf(_x('%1$s on %2$s', 'widgets'), get_comment_author_name(), '' . get_the_title($comment->comment_post_ID) . '') . '

';
}

4. That's it. We uploaded the changed files and the author names did not have links any more.