*** 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@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. One might use "volunteer labor" as a criterion for limiting the list of credits. But what exactly constitutes a volunteer? And do you want to send the message that work we enjoy should be done for free? So to be fair I think we should acknowledge either a suitably representative cross-section of the whole infrastructure, or none of it. It isn't fair to acknowledge just the squeaky wheels. -v