[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[Mike Godwin]

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