[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/2/3 Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu>:
>> I've seen this point made at least three times today.
>>
>> What leads you to believe that the attribution must be on the same medium?
>
> It doesn't necessarily need to be the same medium, but it needs to be
> included in the distribution otherwise you can't guarantee the person
> receiving the content will be able to determine who wrote it. I don't
> see a problem with attribution for a CD of spoken Wikipedia articles
> being written on the cover of the CD case, for example, but it needs
> to be included with the CD some how.

This is not obvious to me.  To give an analogy, distributors of open
source software have an option under many licenses to either:

A) Include the source code with the distribution.
B) Make provisions that the source code will be made available upon demand.

One can make an argument for attribution schemes that are comparable
to the latter.  In other words, providing a statement of where and how
to obtain the full attribution but not actually including the full
attribution directly, except when explicitly requested.  Obviously
there are questions about whether that is included under the heading
of "reasonable" and how to ensure that attribution remains available
into the future, but philosophically I don't believe that free content
necessarily ought to require that the full attribution be included
with all possible forms and media of distribution.

-Robert Rohde