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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
