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Congratulations, you've just reinvented the original BSD-4 license! It included what was called the "obnoxious advertising clause". > 3. All advertising materi

Congratulations, you've just reinvented the original BSD-4 license! It included what was called the "obnoxious advertising clause". > 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the <organization>. There's a good reason why we no longer use BSD-4 anymore. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/bsd.html > The result is a plethora of licenses, requiring a plethora of different sentences. When people put many such programs together in an operating system, the result is a serious problem. Imagine if a software system required 75 different sentences, each one naming a different author or group of authors. To advertise that, you would need a full-page ad. This might seem like extrapolation ad absurdum, but it is actual fact. In a 1997 version of NetBSD, I counted 75 of these sentences. (Fortunately NetBSD has decided to stop adding them, and to remove those it could.)

rbanffy 6y ago
Maybe BSD4 is a good license in this case. I'd prefer AGPL, but then AWS would probably just avoid it.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  The advertising clause is inherently problematic to integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an important part of the community. For a distribution, having to acknowledge 1,000+ authors in all promotional materials is unrealistic. Worse, it won't be a problem initially, but only after most people had noticed this trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly discouraging everyone from using it. A idea is to reword and relax this license: Similar to LGPL, you can skip the acknowledgement if it's used in an unmodified form. But it doesn't really solve the problem - if the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again. The next problem is that, it doesn't really cover all cases - in a previous incident involved Microsoft, Microsoft didn't even use a single line of the original code at all, it was just an inspiration from its framework, and the author was upset for not receiving any acknowledgement... Another idea is using AGPL's approach and targets cloud providers only, but still, it doesn't cover all the cases here. I'm not sure whether using copyright to require acknowledgement is a good idea after all. In the academia, copyright and credit/attribution are two entirely independent process. The credit is not a legal matter, but simply a form of code of conduct and informal politeness. Perhaps promoting a code of conduct for acknowledgement in the industry regarding the use of FOSS could work better.

rbanffy 6y ago

Maybe BSD4 is a good license in this case. I'd prefer AGPL, but then AWS would probably just avoid it.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
The advertising clause is inherently problematic to integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an important part of the community. For a distribution, having to acknowledge 1,000+ authors in all promotional materials is unrealistic. Worse, it won't be a problem initially, but only after most people had noticed this trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly discouraging everyone from using it. A idea is to reword and relax this license: Similar to LGPL, you can skip the acknowledgement if it's used in an unmodified form. But it doesn't really solve the problem - if the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again. The next problem is that, it doesn't really cover all cases - in a previous incident involved Microsoft, Microsoft didn't even use a single line of the original code at all, it was just an inspiration from its framework, and the author was upset for not receiving any acknowledgement... Another idea is using AGPL's approach and targets cloud providers only, but still, it doesn't cover all the cases here. I'm not sure whether using copyright to require acknowledgement is a good idea after all. In the academia, copyright and credit/attribution are two entirely independent process. The credit is not a legal matter, but simply a form of code of conduct and informal politeness. Perhaps promoting a code of conduct for acknowledgement in the industry regarding the use of FOSS could work better.