The Berne convention (which the USA is a signatory) explicit states the existence of moral rights: "Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation" This is not well known, because these rights cannot be licensed or sold in exchange of money, but that does not mean they do not exist. In short, a programmer is, in an inalienable manner, the author of all the programs s/he wrote, whatever the contract or terms used to write them. Modifying the author name is a violation of these rights. Also, IANAL.
This sentence in the article is no longer true. There was a time when people coded stuff, then wrote an I-D to document it. The problem is that the burden of having at least 2 implementations is only to promote an RFC to the Draft Standard level, which is less and less frequent.
This is a real problem, because some of the bugs in an RFC can only be found by testing two implementations against each other. Unfortunately my last tentative to improve this was rejected:
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What I mean is that "floating by the IETF..." is misleading. Anybody can submit an I-D for standard track. Few are adopted by the IETF.
An IETF draft starts with "draft-ietf-". This is merely a proposal by a member of the IETF to discuss this subject.
The Berne convention (which the USA is a signatory) explicit states the existence of moral rights:
"Independent of the author's economic rights, and even after the transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to the said work, which would be prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"
This is not well known, because these rights cannot be licensed or sold in exchange of money, but that does not mean they do not exist.
In short, a programmer is, in an inalienable manner, the author of all the programs s/he wrote, whatever the contract or terms used to write them. Modifying the author name is a violation of these rights. Also, IANAL.
This sentence in the article is no longer true. There was a time when people coded stuff, then wrote an I-D to document it. The problem is that the burden of having at least 2 implementations is only to promote an RFC to the Draft Standard level, which is less and less frequent.
This is a real problem, because some of the bugs in an RFC can only be found by testing two implementations against each other. Unfortunately my last tentative to improve this was rejected:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg55964.html