Re: [Axiom-developer] authorship

[Waldek Hebisch]

Tim Daly wrote: 
> When considering the issue of authorship and credit ask yourself what
> happens when, in 30 years, Axiom contains not a single line of code or
> text that you wrote. Are you still an author? Should you still be in
> the credit list? Is it meaningful for co-authorship to exist between
> people who are 30 years apart in time? Does it hurt to share
> authorship or credit? Is ``diff'' the golden standard?
> 

I distinguish authorship and credit: calculus texbooks develop build
on ideas of Newton and Leibnitz (and many have structure similar to
19-century French texts) -- they acknowledge the intelectual acnestors,
but the authors of previous works are not authors of new ones.

Diff is not "the golden standard": it can be easily fooled by reformatting
or trivial changes, IMHO it is importat if structure of original work
remains (translation into another language may change every word, but
preserves structure).

I think that authors should be comfortable with the idea that work
that at one time was useful/important gets replaced by newer works.
If part that I wrote  is replaced by something new I am no longer
author of the new part, when the whole work changes enough I am no
longer author of the new work.  That does not diminsh credit for past
work.  In the mailing list archive (close to the links you gave)
I found the following passage written by Matt Kaufmann:

----
The Boyer-Moore theorem prover, also called Nqthm, is indeed a product of Bob
Boyer and J Moore.  ACL2 is authored by me (Matt Kaufmann) and J Moore, albeit
with significant early contributions from Boyer, who however is no longer
involved (by his choice).
----

So now authors of ACL2 are Kaufmann and Moore, while Boyer contribution
is acknowledged, but he is no longer considered as an author -- that
looks right for me.

> As a matter of (my) policy it has been the case that the most liberal
> guidelines were used for authorship and credit. I believe this tradition
> should continue.
> 


I wrote (in response to Gaby, cc-ed to you):
| For me "author" has clear meaning:
|  somebody who wrote the work or nontrivial part of it or at least had
| significant influence on the shape of the work.  I somebody replaced
| something that I wrote by new thing but kept my name as an author
| I would probably ask to romove my name -- taking credit for something
| that I did not would only devaluate credits due for things that I
| really did.  However, if Tim Daly feels as a coauthor of new asq
| I will add his name.  But I will not do this without his explicit
| permission.

Tim, you have indirectly answered my question.  But I have to 
ask you explicitly:  Do you agree to have your name in \author
field (as opposed to being mentioned in credits/acknowledments
section) of the asq.c.pamplet file commited to wh-sandbox
branch.  If you want to know more about this file I described
how this file took current shape in:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2007-02/msg00005.html

and

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2007-02/msg00008.html


-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden