Glyn Moody has a new post discussing The Polymath Project, which was a collaborative effort to prove a theorem. Moody uses this project to discuss issues of attribution and authorship within a collaborative environment. From the post:
So far, attribution hasn’t really been a problem, since everyone who contributes is acknowledged – for example through the discussions around the code. Similarly, preservation is dealt with through the tools for source code maanagement and the discussion lists. But there are crucial questions of long-term preservation – not least for historical purposes – which are not really being addressed, even by the longest-established open projects like GNU.
