On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Kevin Shrieve wrote:
> When I think about how to approach licensing within an open-source
> culture-making community I am shaping, I oscillate between...
>
> 1) the urge to build in a protocol of attribution, so as to take
> advantage of the motivational appeal of being recognized
> as contributors (more people might work harder), and
>
> 2) the desire to free participants (including myself) from the tedium
> and the companion text files that strict attribution would require.
Thinking-out-loud on this: we don't want attribution to become such a hassle
as to damage the effectiveness or use of the license itself, like the BSD
license with the advertising clause.
But proper attribution gives protection from forgery: if someone modifies a
copylefted work and then publishes it without attribution (license
permitting), how will the recipients know that they do not have the
original? How will this reflect on the original authors' reputation, or
authors' willingness to use the license? I think this has been the major
impediment to mainstream adoption of copyleft for non-software works -- the
misassumption that copyleft gives away the attribution right of copyright
("Why Software Should Have Owners," a Microsoft-modified RMS essay that
lists RMS as the sole author, or "Why Software Should Not Have Owners," a
Foo-modified RMS essay with one character changed, but Foo listed as sole
author.)
As you say, making attribution explicit via a protocol will encourage
contributors since their work will be recognized, but maintaining text files
is tedious. How can we use computers to automate it or otherwise make it
easier?
