On Aug 30, 2004, at 7:05 PM, John Day wrote:
The best solution is to remove all authorship from all Internet standards, then there will be no problems. This isn't suppose to be an ego trip. If people really think the documents are important, they don't need their names on them. If they need their name on it, they are doing it for the wrong reasons.
I would argue against this on the grounds that we want to encourage standards work as an attractive career path. If we want bright young people to put work into standards, it is appropriate to give credit for that work. Writing a good standard, and building a consensus around it, is a challenging set of tasks that requires a combination of technical and political skills that are all too rare, and sometimes hard to recognize. If we want more companies to send their best people to work in IETF groups, we need to provide something for those people to put on their resumes when they succeed, to help build their career path.
I'm all for doing things for the good of the community, but a major reason IBM gives me considerable latitude to think about it that way is that I have my name on the MIME standard. It's true that I would have done the MIME work whether I was going to get credit for it or not, but I can tell you that having my name associated with it has made a big difference in my career. I'd like future standards writers to be able to aspire to a similar outcome. -- Nathaniel
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