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by clcaev
61 days ago
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Attribution requirements in a free software setting should be viewed as a symmetric property: however you treat incorporated contributions should be a guide (upper bound) for how your own attribution is handled. Symmetry among contributors is a founding principle of Debian licensing requirements, and with respect to legal notices, also seen in the Apache 2.0 (via NOTICE clause) license. The Free Software Foundation sometimes went further than the Apache Foundation with their About dialog or textual notices for end users, so they would learn about their affirmative rights. The purpose of this "prominent but reasonable" preservation requirement is to retain this end user advocacy. Specifically, the GPL copyright contains a prologue which the FSF wished to broadly distribute. This badgeware stuff is a decade old abuse of this end user advocacy strategy. An otherwise permissive license with a prominent but symmetric end user notification might be a helpful addition to OSI license options, but care is needed so it is compatible with GPLv3, reasonable to textual or embedded environments, and precludes stupid badgeware nonsense. Standard approaches and bill of materials could improve the state of the art. |
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