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Paul Taylor | 14 Aug 1990 16:51
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commutative diagrams formatting package

Date: Tue, 14 Aug 90 13:54:01 BST
To: types@..., categories <at> mta.bitnet
Subject: commutative diagrams

*** DISTRIBUTION ***
I dispatched copies of the commutative diagrams package to all those who
requested it on about 20 July. The North American distribution was handled
by an IC student currently working on the Athena project at MIT, whilst
I sent to European and other users myself.  Unfortunately, there appear
to have been problems with both dispatches.  Please, therefore, would you
contact me if you are using / want to use the package, saying * You've got it,
* you asked for it but didnt get it or * You didnt ask for it but want it.
Where several people at an institution use it (Cambridge, Cornell, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, MIT, Oxford & Stanford) it would help also if one one them could
be designated "local manager". I would also appreciate a volonteer who
is competent with TeX, Unix & email at a .edu site to handle forwarding of
future releases to N.American users. Thanks.

*** 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?
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pratt | 15 Aug 1990 17:31
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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 <at> 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.
(Continue reading)

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ap | 17 Aug 1990 17:31
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Re: commutative diagrams formatting package

Return-Path: < <at> computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk:ap@...>
To: pt@..., pratt <at> cs.stanford.edu
Cc: types@...
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 90 17:34:45 +0100

Concerning Paul Taylor's 
>       *** 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?

I think that when something becomes `standard and indispensible', maybe that's
the time to stop acknowledging its creator. In other words, I would (and have)
acknowledge use of Paul's commutative diagram macros as a means of
drawing my colleague's attention to a nice set of macros which they might find
useful---so I would put such acknowlegements in material which is going to see
the light of day rapidly (conference proceedings, tech reports, etc), but
probably not in journal articles and books.

Andy Pitts
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gunter | 17 Aug 1990 17:32

commutative diagrams formatting package

Date: Wed, 15 Aug 90 13:35:53 EDT
To: pratt@...
Cc: types@...

I would not like to feel I should credit Pilot for the fine pen I used
in working out my research results.  I think it's best to use the
"volunteer labor" criterion and try to maintain a sense of proportion
about the size of the contribution.

carl gunter
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Gmane