Anthony wrote:
My point of view is that the proposed license update is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. If Mike is going to deny that moral rights exist in the first place, then I feel the need to explain that they do.
The problem is that moral rights in your sense---i.e. not the legal construct "moral rights" that exists in some countries' laws, but a more general concept of morality as it relates to authorship---boils down to settling philosophical debates on what constitutes a "right", what "morality" is, and so on. You have some opinions on these matters, while others have other opinions, and I certainly don't expect this mailing list to be the place where centuries-long debates over what (if anything) constitutes a "moral right" are resolved. So I'm not too sure what the point of the discussion is.
For what it's worth, Mike's position, that there are no pre-existing moral rights outside those granted by laws and society, is also a legitimate one, and probably the dominant view in modern philosophy of ethics (natural-law theorists aren't too common these days, outside of politics anyway).
For our purposes it boils down to: 1) What, legally, can we do as far as licensing goes? 2) Of the range of options we can legally take, which should we prefer?
You can answer #2 based on a whole range of things, depending on your personal viewpoints on ethics, personal priorities as they relate to the project, preference for being credited versus not, interest in different kinds of reuse, etc., but for our purposes these essentially boil down to various people having different opinions.
-Mark