On Dec 9, 2011, at 8:40 AM, Evain, Jean-Pierre wrote:
> I couldn’t find any particular rule for mentioning credits (or not). I guess 
> this might have had a relation to some rights related issues?
>  
> Can anyone help here e.g. a pointer to a document? Or this is just best 
> practices between contributors of good will?

On Dec 12, 2011, at 9:23 AM, Worley, Dale R (Dale) wrote:
> There are many meanings of "credit".  In regard to the matter of giving 
> credit in Internet-Drafts to the originators of the ideas or writers of the 
> text, it appears to me that the customs are the same as for academic papers:  
> The authors of all ideas and text must be explicitly acknowledged.

As an author/editor, I have always understood this to be a matter of good will. 
If John contributes a specific bit of text, it's good form to say "John Doe 
supplied the text for ..."; If a conversation with Jane was helpful in sorting 
out some of the issues, one might acknowledge conversations with Jane Smith. 
It's not uncommon, in my experience, to get an email from each of ten people 
and maybe exchange emails with one of them delving into a topic, and simply 
list them in the acknowledgements.

One example is 

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6018
6018 IPv4 and IPv6 Greynets. F. Baker, W. Harrop, G. Armitage.
     September 2010. (Format: TXT=21541 bytes) (Status: INFORMATIONAL)

Warren wrote a paper, on Cisco funding, in 2005. In it, he made a suggestion 
for how one might analyze address scans. I got to thinking about that several 
years later; it would be trivial to write as a feature on a router that might 
be of value and more complete (if we would discard a datagram received for an 
address that is not instantiated, we might discard it in the general direction 
of a collector of some sort). Posted the I-D and got v6ops commentary, and then 
Tim Chown and a student tried it out and reported to me with a suggestion on 
data transport. 

Checking the acknowledgements, you'll see that I listed Warren and his 
professor as co-authors, although to be honest they at most made a few comments 
on the actual paper. Why? It is a variation on his original idea, and I'm 
giving him full credit for the idea. Tim and his student get mentioned as 
making a suggestion, because they did some work and it was a good suggestion. 
Others are listed as commenting, because they did. 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6018#section-5

Other examples include 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-baker-bmwg-testing-eyeball-happiness-05#section-5,
 http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bonica-v6-multihome-02#section-6, and 
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6296#section-8.

It can be helpful to the folks acknowledged. I found myself trying to discuss 
my own contributions to routing protocols recently, for example, and not having 
been the author of any documents specifically on routing didn't have anything 
to point to - until I recalled that I had been acknowledged in RFC 1583 and 
2178 for contributions to it (the p2mp interface was my solution to an NBMA 
problem, among other things).

Yes, the customs are pretty similar to academic papers. The key word is 
"custom"; there is no "law" other than the laws around good will that require 
this. But it is customary and normal.
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