On Thu, 1 Mar 2007 09:55:07 +0000 Anthony W. Youngman wrote: > In message <20070301000340.4a771658.frx@firenze.linux.it>, Francesco > Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it> writes > >I think that requiring a credit "at least as prominent as the credits > >for the other contributing authors" for a small contribution is > >requiring excessive credit. > >That's why I consider this clause as a non-free restriction. > > > >As I said, if the clause said "at least as prominent as the credits > >for the authors of other comparable contributions", it would be OK, > >but the actual clause doesn't say so, unfortunately. > > Okay, I'm thinking of programs here, but I've come across several > projects that, when they rev the program, drop the credits of authors > of the previous version into a credits file. > > Given that linux replaces a considerable amount of code at every > iteration, and other projects probably do the same, this seems fair. Possibly (at least, AFAIK, the GNU GPL v2 permits this practice!). > However, this clause, to me, seems to forbid this practice. IIUC, it does. > > Indeed, the "drop credits into a file" approach may be a very fair way > of thanking authors whose work has been completely rewritten and who > therefore no longer have any right to credit in the current work but > who deserve credit because it was their work in the original > instance. With this clause, how can you be fair to people like that? I'm not sure I see your point here: when dealing with authors whose contribution has been completely deleted or replaced, we have no credit obligations whatsoever. We can of course thank them, but they cannot exploit copyright laws anymore in order to force us to credit them. Hence, this clause (or any other, for that matter) does not make a difference, being inside a license we don't need anymore: we do not need a license for a contribution we are no longer using... -- http://frx.netsons.org/progs/scripts/refresh-pubring.html Need to refresh your keyring in a piecewise fashion? ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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