Anthony writes:

The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work.

This is a very odd notion, and I find nothing in the language of any free license that supports it. Freely licensed photos, for example, don't have to have the attribution as "part of" the photo. Freely licensed texts don't require that attribution occur *within* the text proper -- it can occur at the beginning or the end. (You can imagine how much more difficult a software manual would be to use if attribution had to occur right next to the incorporated text.) The whole notion that attribution is required "part of the [substantive] work itself" rather than adjacent to it, or easily reachable from it, is your invention, and, in my view, not a requirement of the language of free licenses.

We honor free licenses by making it possible to determine the provenance of a work, not by making attribution part of the work itself. Nor has the notion of attribution ever been meant to be understood rigidly. As Richard Stallman says in his letter regarding the point-release change to GFDL: "We have never asserted that we will not change our licenses, or that we will never make changes like this one. Rather, our commitment is that our changes to a license will stick to the spirit of that license, and will uphold the purposes for which we wrote it."

Stallman also says this: "We did this to allow those sites [such as Wikipedia] to make their licenses compatible with other large collections of copylefted material that they want to cooperate with."

The ultimate question has to be whether we truly believe Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects really do aim to make it easier to spread free knowledge throughout the world -- there is a general acknowledgement that the particulars of the GFDL may make it hard for the projects to do this, and that is why FSF decided to allow the opportunity for dual-licensing of Wikipedia content under GFDL 1.3 and a particular subset of CC-BY-SA -- both requires attribution but acknowledge that massive collaborative projects raise special problems in balancing the need for attribution against the need to share free knowledge. If the former is ultimately seen as more important than the latter -- which is apparently your view, Anthony -- then we're scarcely better off under a free license than we were under the "all rights reserved" regime of traditional copyright.

I think Stallman's approach of sticking to the spirit of free licenses is the right attitude to have. Otherwise we stick to the letter of your requirement, Anthony, and lose the spirit altogether.

--Mike