[Rd] GPL and R Community Policies (Rcpp)

[Liviu Andronic]

Dear all

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Dominick Samperi <djsamperi at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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