On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Gabor Grothendieck <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ggrothendieck@gmail.com">ggrothendieck@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Hadley Wickham <<a href="mailto:hadley@rice.edu">hadley@rice.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
>> Perhaps a wider community of R users can weigh in on a<br>
>> policy decision that was implicitly deemed acceptable on this<br>
>> thread. Namely, that it is fine to arbitrarily and<br>
>> for no reason deprecate the contributions of past<br>
>> authors, and as more progress is made, even more<br>
>> disparaging remarks can be added.<br>
><br>
> What is disparaging about saying "a small portion of the code is based<br>
> on code written during 2005 and 2006 by Dominick Samperi"? I read this<br>
> as a factual statement saying that the current version of Rcpp is<br>
> based on, in a small way, your earlier work.<br>
><br>
> For reference, a disparaging comment would be something like: "This<br>
> package was based code written by Hadley Wickham that made my eyes<br>
> bleed", or "The development of this package was driven by the godawful<br>
> code that Hadley wrote".<br>
><br>
<br>
<br>
</div>Its very difficult to truly assess relative contributions when you mix<br>
in design, coding, level of effort, promotion, etc. I would not<br>
focus on the single word "disparaging". I think the poster simply<br>
used the wrong word and perhaps what he meant was more along the lines<br>
of: as the creator of the package he presumably set the design (or<br>
significant elements of the design) for all subsequent work and in<br>
that respect even if its true that the number of lines he generated is<br>
relatively small compared to the current package, that phrase gives<br>
the misleading impression that his contribution was also small. There<br>
is a difference between something that is true and non-misleading and<br>
something that is true and misleading.<br></blockquote><div><br>There is an important element of this discussion that is being overlooked,<br>namely, the timing. If indeed my contributions were minimal (and they<br>were not for the reasons you suggest) then why was it decided now,<br>
for this particular release, to update my status? Why not the last<br>release? What changed? There were only a few new features added<br>to this release. What made the difference?<br><br>More importantly, as I suggested in my original post, this practice<br>
sets an absurd precedent, one that motivated Stallman to write<br>the GNU manifesto (where he used the oxygen mask metaphor).<br>Should we reevaluate all contributors, present or past, and <br>adjust the level of deprecation on the<br>
author line appropriately before each release?<br><br>I suspect that I have contributed far more than some of the<br>people listed on the author line. Does this mean that their<br>contributions should be discounted accordingly? If not,<br>
why not?<br><br>Thanks for your courage. People who send supportive comments<br>tend to send them off-list, not wanting to state them publicly.<br><br>Dominick<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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