[Axiom-developer] axiom credit list

[daly]

Ralf,

There are no criteria for adding someone's name to the list except
that you, I, or anyone else believes the name should be added.

The list is meaningless in the sense that, as a set, there is no
rule for deciding membership. It isn't an attempt at academic credit.

The )credit command and the credit list exists because of my personal
experience with IBM. I worked on several projects there and
occasionally I watched as people who left had their name expunged from
the documentation after leaving the project. The particular example
that caused me to make the original list was that I worked for years on
a project and wrote a couple hundred page document. It had 4 names on
the front cover. Within a week after leaving the project the document
had 3 names on the cover. It felt like people had simply walked off
with several years worth of work without so much as mentioning my
name.  That seemed unjust.  So I spent a while dragging thru all of
the scratchpad documentation, mailing lists, and people's memories to
try to find names of people who had contributed to scratchpad. Thus
the list was born.

If you look at the very last line, the first entry in the changelog
file, you'll see that I added Mike O'Connor to the credits list. This
was due to a conversation with Dick Jenks shortly before he died. 
Mike never worked on the project but helped Dick with early VM-based
versions of the system. Mike had an IBM/370 board that fit into an
IBM/PC and was helpful in shaking out portability bugs. Only Dick 
mentioned his contribution, and that was after it was open source.

Every so often I drag thru the mailing lists, my other correspondence,
and other contacts that I have had trying to find people who had passed
thru the project, had an effect, and might have been missed.

Credit is costless to share and there is always enough blame to go
around.  If someone you know has contributed to Axiom in some form
feel free to add them to the list of credits. No explanation is
necessary. There are no rules and no guidelines, just your own private
judgement that they deserve to be mentioned.

Tim