Citation requirements
Hello,
I've come across a piece of software that has a requirement in its
license text mandating to cite a certain set of works in scientific
publications for which the software has been used.
I vaguely remember that such citation requirement clauses were generally
considered to be non-free (see, e.g., [1]), but I have trouble to come
up with a reason for this assessment. Essentially, such a requirement is
nothing but an obnoxious advertising clause, which of course is widely
regarded to be DSFG-free (but GPL-incompatible). One could even argue
that the citation requirement is less severe, as it only asks you to do
what many of the potential users are required by law to do anyway.
Can works with a citation requirement go into main? If you're interested
in the specific case, the actual license text is available at [2].
Hendrik
[1] <https://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html>
[2] <http://sourceforge.net/p/openmps/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/gpl3-cite.txt>
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