[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 11:44 PM, John at Darkstar <vacuum at jeb.no> wrote:
[snip]
> The main problem with the GFDL is how to clearly identify the work as
> licensed under GFDL. Today this leads to the printing of the whole
> license text, but the only thing necessary is identification of the
> license in a clearly visible manner.

One of the proposed FSF GFDL revision drafts had a size threshold for
triggering the requirement to reproduce the license text.
(http://gplv3.fsf.org/comments/gfdl-draft-1.html; 6a)

Informing people of their rights is important: Since if they don't
know them they might as well not have them. If the license text is
well written, or at least has a good preamble, then including it can
go a long way to further understanding of Free content (it's not just
no cost!), unfortunately the FDL isn't clear and don't have a clear
preamble. But the GPLv3 very much is and does, so it can be done.

Including a single license copy squeezed onto a page along with 1000
pages of information is pretty non-burdensome, even in printed form.
Certainly no worse than all the other random overhead pages a book
typically contains.

The thresholds in the proposed draft may be probably too low to remove
this burden (it was something like 20k words or 10 pages), but it's an
indication that the general approach may be acceptable to the
drafters.


> Rethink the whole problem, whats necessary is to be able to identify a
> work and as part of this be able to identify the license and other data.
> Perhaps something like an ISBN-number for any authored work, and then
> some kind of magic site that can act as a broker between those who need
> additional information and those who deliver such information. This
> could be a step further than today, not only identifying which license a
> particular work uses, but also licensing of previous version and how it
> relates to other parts of a collection of works.

Hm.  Well it would have to be Universal, and it purpose is Locating
Resources, so we could call it a ULR!  This seems somehow familiar. ;)

More seriously, a clearing house would be interesting and very useful.
But I think in terms of providing licensing information it still makes
sense to always tag along: "year, basic attribution; license" if
nothing else.   A clearing house identifier would be bonus.


The other *must solve* issue is the gratuitous incompatibility with
similar but different licenses: You can't create a new work that is
derived from both third-party FDL content and third-party CC-By-SA
content while strictly conforming with the licenses.  (many people
would call this the most significant problem with the FDL today,
thought it's also true of all other existing copyleft free content
licenses)

I think that almost everyone agrees that you ought to be able to do
this (the most negative thing I've seen said about it is that you
ought to respect the most restrictive of the combined terms in this
case), and there are a number of ways to address this.  My preferred
way is to just have the licenses explicitly enumerate compatible
licenses and the rules for combined works. GPLv3 addressed the
compatibility question in a different way, but it was addressed
successfully there, so again it has been proven that it can be done.