[Rcpp-devel] GPL and R Community Policies (Rcpp)

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com>wrote:

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Hadley Wickham<hadley at rice.edu>  wrote:

Perhaps a wider community of R users can weigh in on a
policy decision that was implicitly deemed acceptable on this
thread. Namely, that it is fine to arbitrarily and
for no reason deprecate the contributions of past
authors, and as more progress is made, even more
disparaging remarks can be added.

What is disparaging about saying "a small portion of the code is based
on code written during 2005 and 2006 by Dominick Samperi"? I read this
as a factual statement saying that the current version of Rcpp is
based on, in a small way, your earlier work.

For reference, a disparaging comment would be something like: "This
package was based code written by Hadley Wickham that made my eyes
bleed", or "The development of this package was driven by the godawful
code that Hadley wrote".

Its very difficult to truly assess relative contributions when you mix
in design, coding, level of effort, promotion, etc.   I would not
focus on the single word "disparaging".  I think the poster simply
used the wrong word and perhaps what he meant was more along the lines
of: as the creator of the package he presumably set the design (or
significant elements of the design) for all subsequent work and in
that respect even if its true that the number of lines he generated is
relatively small compared to the current package, that phrase gives
the misleading impression that his contribution was also small.  There
is a difference between something that is true and non-misleading and
something that is true and misleading.

There is an important element of this discussion that is being overlooked,
namely, the timing. If indeed my contributions were minimal (and they
were not for the reasons you suggest) then why was it decided now,
for this particular release, to update my status? Why not the last
release? What changed? There were only a few new features added
to this release. What made the difference?

More importantly, as I suggested in my original post, this practice
sets an absurd precedent, one that motivated Stallman to write
the GNU manifesto (where he used the oxygen mask metaphor).
Should we reevaluate all contributors, present or past, and
adjust the level of deprecation on the
author line appropriately before each release?

I suspect that I have contributed far more than some of the
people listed on the author line. Does this mean that their
contributions should be discounted accordingly? If not,
why not?

Thanks for your courage. People who send supportive comments
tend to send them off-list, not wanting to state them publicly.

Dominick

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