Brian - I know the paper and Mash - the 3rd author and lived the times ;-)

I just don't see how having the ability to give away a file to some one else made it easier for anyone - system programmer or admin.   The idea of giving a device back begs the question of how did you get ownership in the first place.    

The one thing I could think of was something like the RJE system that you would wanted to have made your files be owned by the RJE system, have them send it to the mainframe, get back information and then give the results back to you.   If they wanted to do that subsystem with out a root style privilege, you would need some way to give files away.

But I can think of other ways to do that without needing the chown(2) call to work with that semantic, so I really don't understand what it was used.

To me, it does not seem to be worth much.   As I said have to ask Mash if he remembers why it was considered a good idea.

Clem