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 _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
