[Rd] OT: authorship and contacts for releasing packages (Re: reshape scaling with large numbers of times/rows)

[Mitch Skinner]

If people are annoyed by the off-topic-ness, just let me know and I'll
take it off list.  Also, I don't expect to necessarily convert anyone to
my point of view, but I would like to try and articulate it a bit better
(sorry for the length).  More inline:

On Thu, 2006-08-24 at 20:23 +0100, Hin-Tak Leung wrote: 
> (1) in many contexts, your employer owns any result of
> "work for hire", so if you are paid to program on something,
> while you can put your names down, your employers are also entitled
> to erase all your claims of copyright or ownership on it. This sounds 
> very hash, but that's how the reality is.

You're absolutely right about this.  My employer can certainly put their
name on it if they want, but so far they haven't said so.  If someone
asked them for help down the road I don't think they'd have much
interest/expertise in responding.

> (2) for most users, some reasonable expectation of *continual*
> support, by an organization, or at least more than 1 individual,
> is important. Using an anonymous or "consumer" mailer, doesn't give
> good impression about the _quality_  of the work, nor the
> _continuity_ of it. While you think it helps
> people to contact you *after* they have adopted your software,
> having an unprofessionally-looking addresses attached to it
> may deter people from *adopting* in the first place, so you lose
> before it even starts.

I have to disagree with this one.  I have a hard time imagining anyone
else at my work getting into the R internals.  However, even though I
don't own the work I do for my employer, I do feel attached to it enough
to help people with it down the road even if I change jobs.  So in my
case the best chance of continuing support is my personal contact
information.

I also disagree with the suggestion that my first messages were
anonymous because they didn't include an affiliation.  I know that a lot
of people find it easier to think primarily in terms of organizations,
but in my opinion one of the big strengths of free/open source software
developed collaboratively over the network is that individuals can get
involved.  This may be a little grandiose but I think there's a secular
shift (especially in software) away from the formal organization and
toward a less formal community of interested people.  I think the
individual is primary, rather than the organization.  Point being, it's
not anonymous because I put my name right on it.

As for whether or not that's unprofessional, I would hope that people
judge the quality of the work by the work itself.  As you know, with
free software this is much easier to do than it would have been
otherwise.

> (3) if somebody wants to contact you for a purpose that's important to
> them, they will find a way - e.g. look it up to see who might be in
> the same division or who might have been your boss, if e-mail bounces,
> askes the postmaster, etc, or brunt-force googling. What do you
> expect people will want to contact you for?

I've seen people on the linux kernel mailing list complaining that
contributors are often hard to track down after the fact.  Obviously, as
projects like R grow, they're going to attract contributions from a
larger number of people.  I'm just trying to spare people the potential
effort of tracking down the ex-boss or brute-force googling.

My main concern is that something I wrote will turn out to have been
incomplete or confusing, and someone using/extending it will want to ask
what the heck I was thinking.

> (4) lastly, there seems to be some wishful thinking between
> "...don't exactly have a tenured position..." and "...want to get
> in touch with me sometime in the far future...". Tenure is seldomly
> a result of "oh, I read-a-paper/use-a-software/whatever and it
> impresses me so much that I have to hunt down the person who did it,
> *whatever he is like*, *wherever he is*, *whatever he is doing*,
> and hire him to work for me...".

I'm not after tenure; I'm just a staff person.  The tenure thing was
just to remark that most people I know change jobs frequently enough
that work email addresses are not particularly stable.

The "far future" thing turns out to have been wishful thinking, yes,
though on the time scale of email-address-longevity "far future" isn't
terribly long.

> I have been hunted down twice for work I did as far as I remember, after
> I moved on from the context. One did a google, the other got it
> from my ex-boss - the latter wanted some answers on
> details, which I provided, and I did get an extended "thank you",
> plus a "if you ever want a reference, I am willing
> to testify to the quality of your work" statement, which is nice,
> but cannot be taken literally nor seriously.

I think it's worthwhile to make things like this easier.  How many
people would have contacted you if you had the same email address?
Also, maybe I'm naive, but I would have taken that "if you ever want a
reference" comment seriously.

I did diagnose and fix a bug in my code for an ex-boss once, partly
because he was a nice guy and I felt embarrassed by the bug, but also
the idea that something I did still mattered to someone else was pretty
cool.  It felt good to figure out the problem and get the code working
again, and that was enough for me--is that weird?  I certainly wouldn't
mind having more interactions like that in the future.

Mitch