luke wrote: > I can appreciate the sentiment around attribution. I think that it is > a very true fact that if you allowed attribution public facing, it > would encourage the creation and sharing of more themes. I feel that > the inclusion of rel="nofollow" would mitigate that slightly.
Where I get lost in this argument is in the idea that the creation and sharing of a theme be contingent on attribution. You can already do this, but not in the repo. The only reason a person would want to commit such a theme to the repo is for visibility's sake. It is imperative that contributors not misunderstand the repo as a distribution venue. Its current value as a distribution venue is incidental. Being that the repo was explicitly created with the intent (among other significant intents) to cultivate materials (and developers) that are appropriate for inclusion in core, and given that no core contribution may include personal attribution, it is therefore not appropriate to encourage/allow themes with public-facing attribution in the extras repo. A theme directory on the HabariProject.org site itself, which would certainly allow and encourage inclusion of external themes with any attribution or even commercial tendencies, is a sorely lacking component of our current offerings. In that venue, any attribution is appropriate. In the repo, only the specified attribution is appropriate. They are different components with different intents. We should take greater care to keep Habari free and open, which to me is an acceptable gain against trading off a bit of early publicity for some theme authors who need attribution capabilities before considering contribution, something they'll eventually get with a theme directory anyway. The alternative suggested use of the repo, to my ears, is a chaotic free-for-all of mixed licenses and attribution, and is potentially one of the greatest opportunities for the project to be forced into that legal action that we're always fearful of. If we're concerned about project longevity, this is something we should consider more carefully before simply throwing open the gates to any contribution, attribution, license, or outright plagiarism. It's a slippery slope. I think these rules are easier to implement than making attribution acceptable only under certain conditions or only when doing it a certain way. What is written about attribution here and on the extras repo wiki page is the minimal set of inclusion requirements that everyone seems able to agree on. That is to say, if the requirements for inclusion in the repo were more lax or strict, more people would take issue with them than what do now. We can mostly all agree that what the current rules say should be included, we should include. There will always be opinion on what we should include, and it's good to revisit it, but I think we have not yet tried to work within the rules already defined, nor is there a firm understanding of what the components at issue are about. If we burn the fields of our repo with attributed content, we'll not be able to easily recover that land. Likewise, consider that any useful theme directory that would help solve our problems would likely grow in that otherwise fertile soil. If we were to direct the energy spent on changing or disagreeing with the rules instead at erecting the solution that works with the existing rules (creating a theme and plugin directory) to address the true issue (top-tier exposure for contributions, whether free or commercial) then I think we would be better served in the end, even if the result is to determine that we need some other solution. I can't imagine it, but if this proposal fails and we then decide that throwing open the repo doors to any contribution, attributed or not, will yield better results, then so be it. Owen --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/habari-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
