Re: computer-go: Sharing Go modules

[William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 18, 2001 at 10:25:26AM -0700, Daniel Bump wrote:
(quoting Mark Boon I think) 
> > The OpenSource license seems more like what I intend to do, except that I'm
> > missing something. It seems reasonable to me to require anyone who uses my
> > modules, in whole or in part, to include a notice of the fact. Similar as in
> > scientific publications, where if it is based on other research or papers, a
> > reference has to be included. Other than that the OpenSource license seems
> > fine by me. Or am I being too vain to wish people to include a sentence like
> > "This software uses the Tesuji Software Go library" either in the manual or
> > on the screen?

[snip]
> The BSD license is similar to the X11 license but originally
> included an advertising requirement similar to what you described.
> This advertising clause was rescinded after a lot of criticism.
> 
> A case against including an advertising clause may be found at:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

As the maintainer of a sizable free system
(http://sbcl.sourceforge.net) which includes some BSD-licensed code, I
haven't has as much trouble as the referenced page describes, but I
can believe it could quickly add up in other cases. And the
inconvenience, and potential inconvenience, is real enough that it has
influenced my choices about free code to include in the system.

If all you want is credit, why not ask for it as a matter of courtesy
instead of requiring it as a term of your license? You might well get
at least as much credit as you would by demanding it. Demanding it
probably increases the proportion of users who will give credit, but
it probably diminishes the probability that people will use your code,
because of misgivings about the nuisance effect described on that
page. And the proportion of credit you'll lose to people who are too
obnoxious or careless to acknowledge you might be smaller than you
fear. Acknowledgement is very cheap and a reputation for honesty is
important, so I'd guess you wouldn't lose much.

Also, to emphasize someone else's point, since lots of people think of
commercializing their code, if all you want is credit, and in
particular if you don't mind people making money off your system,
please be sure to make that clear. Licenses that waffle on that
question have caused a lot of headaches.

-- 
William Harold Newman <william.newman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
"Tweak alpha so it sends SIGBUS for unaligned access, and does NOT
do a fixup. This encourages people to fix their code." -- a commit
note from <http://www.OpenBSD.org/plus29.html>
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