Causal controversy at Le Mont St.-Michel (5th ACM SIGOPS Workshop 1992) : Models and paradigms for distributed systems structuring

As usual, the SIGOPS workshop provided a great platform for interesting discussion. Among other things, a controversy arose around the usefulness of causal ordering in a distributed system. In this paper, I explain causality in non-technical terms, and enumerate some of the most prevalent misconceptions that surrounded causality. Next I present some important examples where causal delivery is a necessary and sufficient ordering of events