We still have to have a spec that can be referenced.
I personally don't care who wrote the spec, as long as it's published,
widely available, and the community agrees that it's good enough to use.
Do a DejaNews search for the subject "Specification for Ron Rivests Cipher
No.2" (I didn't call it RC2 :-) posted to sci.crypt on 11 Feb 1996,
message-ID <4fk39f$f70(_at_)net(_dot_)auckland(_dot_)ac(_dot_)nz>. This has
also ended up on a
number of FTP sites, and I've seen it on at least one CDROM archive. I assume
that's enough to qualify it as "widely published".
Peter.