9 Aug
2009
9 Aug
'09
1:46 p.m.
On Sunday 09 August 2009 02:11:46 Jeff McClintock wrote:
Chris Cannam
I don't recall it like this. Requiring attribution is one thing. Here is the
objected to clause:
"3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the University of
California, Berkeley and its contributors."
So, if you had a program that incorporated code from 10 different projects
that were licensed under the original BSD license and you wanted to place a
classified ad in your newspaper offering your program for sale, you would
have to include:
" This product includes software developed by the University of
California, Berkeley and its contributors."
ten different time with the attribution bit changed per project.
And it went further than ten it seems:
" 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.)"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html
>> ... but it's probably
>> illegal and certainly unethical to redistribute someone else's work
>> without attribution (a basic necessity of copyright which the GPL
>> doesn't disclaim).
The BSD license originally required attribution. The GPL people objected,
calling it the "obnoxious BSD advertising clause ... and forced this clause
removed.
So it's fair to say the GPL does NOT require attribution.
Jeff McClintock
all the best,
drew