GPL and R Community Policies (Rcpp)

Dear all

The author line of the latest release of the R package
Rcpp (0.8.9) was revised as follows:

From: "based on code written during 2005 and 2006 by Dominick Samperi"

To: "a small portion of the code is based on code written during 2005 and
2006 by Dominick Samperi"

From the info given in the thread, personally I'm sympathetic to

Dominick's complaint: the latter message is no proper way to
acknowledge the original author of the package. As I see it, the
project either:
- explicitly mentions the original author and the active (current)
contributors (and perhaps previous ones), or
- lines up all previous contributors in a line and singles out the
active contributors

But saying that the original author's contributions represented some
coding of random importance (implied in the message above), only a
subset of which made it to the current release, sounds disparaging to
my ears, too.

My humble opinion
Liviu