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Re: commutative diagrams formatting package

Date: 14 Aug 90 14:13:10 PDT (Tue)

	*** DISCUSSION POINT ***
	One person complained at being asked to acknowledge me in his
	published papers.  TeX & LaTeX are now standard and
	indispensible tools, so we should credit Knuth & Lamport. What
	do you think are the pros & cons of such acknowledgement?

(Since types@theory readers are presumably Paul's main customers I
guess that makes this the right forum for this discussion.)

Thus far I've simply been putting "The paper was typeset using D.
Knuth's TeX, L. Lamport's LaTeX macros, and P. Taylor's diagram macros"
in my acknowledgment sections.  But Paul's bringing this issue up here
got me to thinking again about it.  Is this *enough* acknowledgment?

Shifting to more credits in publishing is a nice idea provided people
aren't left out unfairly.  Traditionally the movie industry has been as
long on infrastructure credit as the publishing industry has been
short.  Both have large amounts of such infrastructure, which for
fairness calls for a lot of credits, if any, in either business.

In today's electronic publishing, certainly Knuth and Lamport spring to
mind immediately.  But if you use Unix you should also credit Ritchie
and Thompson, if vi or Emacs then Bill Joy or Richard Stallman, if a
Sun then various hardware and software designer-implementors, including
me for drawing your every pixel via Pixrect---I put a lot of work into
making the Pixrect graphics interface design clean without unduly
compromising performance of the implementation, so that the screen
wouldn't be a bottleneck for your text editor or figure editor.

One might use "volunteer labor" as a criterion for limiting the list of
credits.  But what exactly constitutes a volunteer?  And do you want to
send the message that work we enjoy should be done for free?

So to be fair I think we should acknowledge either a suitably
representative cross-section of the whole infrastructure, or none of
it.  It isn't fair to acknowledge just the squeaky wheels.
-v