Priority claim re bootstrapping

[Orians, Jeremiah (DTMB)]

> Claims of priority in innovation have some importance to history. 
> You can see the level of controversy created by a latecomer who 
> claimed that he "invented email" here:
Only if parties care about credit more than seeing the goal reached.

> And there's the key role that priority has in whether inventions are
> patentable and by whom, which has led to huge financial implications;
Nothing about bootstrapping is patentable, it is all built on prior art.

> Therefore, in a community of technical experts, when a difference of
> opinion comes up on the priority of a useful invention, it is useful for
> the issue to be examined in more detail, among people who "were
> there at the time".  Such an examination tends to bring out more facts,
> which become very useful to later observers who weren't there and
> have to figure out what may have happened from scanty documentation.
Nothing about the bootstrappable project is scantly documented.
It is over 6 years of work done by more than a dozen individuals.
Lots of hard work but not inventions.

> Personally I don't have a stake in which claims about "bootstrapping
> a large collection of source code programs from a small binary seed"
> hold up to detailed historical and technical examination or not.  It
> seems to me that cross-bootstrapping from a more mature software
> architecture has for decades been the norm, even in the creation of
> the original UNIX.
Yes, hence the question of the definition of terms.

> I do think the topic is a suitable one for the Reproducible Builds community
> to discuss.  Politely conducted disputes should not be dismissed as
> "nonsense" with a suggestion that the parties unsubscribe from the list. 
> Inflating the emotional tone of the discussion is not constructive toward
> the community discovering whatever contemporaneous truths may be
> findable behind the various claims.
Not exactly, it belongs on the bootstrappable list; not to clog up the reproducible
builds list with unneeded noise, about what the definition of full source bootstrap
should be.

-Jeremiah