The note doesn't do it for me. The issue is not just Hughes's lack of proper attribution on stage, but his assumption of credit. The interview doesn't absolve him, it implicates him, when he says ARToolkit is unbelievably awesome and then, "Folks ported it from C, which is what it's written on, onto Java. And then we took the Java port and made it work in Flash." Isn't he saying that he was integral to the port from Java?
Later in the interview, he says that making AR easy was "all we were looking to do." He calls himself a researcher and says, "It's open source. Everything I do is about being very open." On the stage he says he "wrote a bunch of code". I can't come to any other conclusion than that he misrepresented his contribution throughout. But neither he nor TED has acknowledged that fact or apologized for it.
I'm not saying we need to string him up for it, but both he and TED need to stop making excuses and start making a sincere apology.
Later in the interview, he says that making AR easy was "all we were looking to do." He calls himself a researcher and says, "It's open source. Everything I do is about being very open." On the stage he says he "wrote a bunch of code". I can't come to any other conclusion than that he misrepresented his contribution throughout. But neither he nor TED has acknowledged that fact or apologized for it.
I'm not saying we need to string him up for it, but both he and TED need to stop making excuses and start making a sincere apology.