Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bitteralmond 3744 days ago
The magic of Kernighan:

"When we were choosing among typesetting systems, Brian never let on that he was one of the original authors of Troff, the system we ultimately went with," Donovan said. "I realized this only after researching many early papers on digital typesetting; Brian co-wrote all of them."

1 comments

It's funny how times change. My first thought was "that's a conflict of interest and it would've been polite to mention it." He apparently doesn't believe that his collaborators might have their own ways of dealing with conflicts. But then: I think it's a generational thing. He is from a world where people have simple allegiances and hidden conflicts are rare. In the Internet age relationships are so fragmented conflicts of interest are part of the day to day collaboration process.