[cap-talk] Global name, attribution, etc. rights - Mark Miller mentioned

[Mark Miller]

Nick Szabo wrote:
>> there
>> are many kinds of information pertinent to conceptualizing an entity
>> that a CA doesn't provide, there are many kinds of entities (see my
>> big list in a previous post) that a CA doesn't help conceptualize,
>> and the CA ultimately may not be the best source of even information
>> about organizations.  Also keep in mind that I'm talking about petnames
>> in general here (as conceived by their inventor Mark Miller), not about
>> the Petname Toolbar in particular.

I wish I knew who to credit with the invention of the PetName idea, but I 
don't. I may or may not be the inventor -- I don't know. The Acknowledgments 
section at the end of
http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/pnml.html says:

> Besides myself, as far as I can remember the people who worked on or
> influenced the PetName system include: Eric Messick, John Sullivan, Trevor
> Morris, Bill Frantz, and Ellen Isaacs. Perhaps also Randy Farmer. Apologies if
> I've left anyone out. Please let me know.
> 
> The current state of thinking on PetNames owes a debt to the e-lang,
> web-calculus, and cap-talk communities, and especially to Bryce "Zooko"
> Wilcox-O'Hearn, Tyler Close, Marc Stiegler, and Alan Karp.

I clearly remember that the idea was absent at the beginning of a particular 
conversation, and was essentially fully formed at the end of it. If anyone who 
participated in that original conversations has a memory of the "moment of 
invention", if any, please post. Unless we hear otherwise, I suggest that we 
should assume that the conversation as a whole was the process of invention, 
and that all the names in my first list above are jointly inventors of the idea.

I'm happy to take personal credit for posting the first public explanation of 
the idea.

Jed Donnelley wrote:
> Then maybe we are talking about two different things.  I'm talking
> about the most concrete instance I've seen, namely the Petname
> toolbar that Tyler provided.  Of course Mark Miller has chimed in a
> few times on this topic, but looking back at his comments I don't
> see any that seem to object to the more narrow notion of Petname
> use that is suggested by Tyler's implementation.

I agree. As far as I'm concerned, Tyler's system is a petname system.

-- 
     Cheers,
     --MarkM