Authors and Editors (was Re: RFC Author Count and IPR)

Dropping techspec and ipr-wg from this part of the thread

> The current limit of 5 seems to be motivated by formatting constraints and 
> maybe by the notion that "vanity" publishing should be prevented. It is 
> not clear to me that these motivations have legal standing and 
> essentially, for practical purposes, force authors to give up their 
> rights. In the past, I know that for some drafts, this limit has been 
> extended when the AD made the right noises to the RFC editor, so it is not 
> universally observed.
People can tell me that I've been misleading WG chairs and editors, but what 
I've been saying in the WG Leadership tutorial is that the 5-author limit 
resulted from
- the practice of contacting authors at AUTH48, only to find out that more 
authors increase the likelihood of job changes and/or e-mail bounces, plus
- several "dog-pile" author lists on drafts with a huge number of authors, 
leading us to suspect that this was an effort to demonstrate "support" from 
a large group of vendors ("so this should be a WG draft and WGLCed 
immediately"), plus
- text formatting software that "broke" when the author list wouldn't fit on 
one page because there were so many authors.
I hear Russ's concern about tracking IPR sources, but hope this doesn't get 
conflated with author/editor tracking.
I'm the draft editor for the Softwires problem statement, which would have 
seven authors (including me), except that we're trying to observe the 
five-author guideline. Since this causes some heartburn, what I've been 
thinking about proposing was
- if you have individual authors, you do both the front page and the author 
section as we do them today
- if you have an editor, you list the editor on the front page, but not the 
authors, and you list both editors and authors listed in the author section 
(as we do today)
But I'm still thinking...

Thanks,

Spencer 


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