Advertising Clauses in Licenses

[Justin Wells]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2002 at 08:56:23PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote:

> Perhaps you've never had to put together a Linux distribution, or an embedded
> Linux product. Consider the overhead this places on Debian, which has
> up to 5000 packages in a distribution.

This is a real issue. 

I don't think asking people to include credit notices is philosophically
at odds with open source software. On the other hand, there is this practical
issue: if each license asked you to do something a little different, it's
a major headache. 

The OSD has been presented as a fairly abstract set of principles which 
a license must adhere to. It's dealing with the question at the abstract
level, and certifying a license according to whether it does or does not
conflict with those abstract principles. 

Perhaps this is the wrong way to go about it. Perhaps it's time for the 
OSD to get a little more dirty and pratical and so something useful like
specify exactly what kind of credit requirement would be OK. 

You could solve the practical problem for Debian by creating a "maximum
template" and if you did the maximum for every software package you would
therefore satisfy every OSD certified license. Those that didn't ask for
the maximum would surely not complain that you gave them more credit and
notice than they were owed.

I'm thinking of something like this:

    An OSD license may ask that users include a credit note in any
    or all of the following documents:

	  -- any document longer than 1000 words which explains
	     how to use the software (eg: "user manual")

          -- any document which lists the contributors whose 
             source code contributed to the product (eg: "About" box)

          -- a "credits" document which must accompanying the software

    The credit included above may require the inclusion any or all of the 
    following information:

          -- a specific copyright statement, up to 100 words
          -- the name of the included OSD software package
          -- the author of the OSD software package
          -- the email address and website for the author
          -- the email address and website for the product
          -- the physical address and phone number of the author
          -- a statement, up to 100 words, describing the software

Then if you included all of that information in all of the required
documents for all included software you would know that you had 
satisfied the requirement. 

The list can debate until either satisfied or blue in the face what 
the allowed documents and the allowed bits of information should be. 
What I wrote above is just an example of what it might be. 

Many people seem to want that, and this approach would eliminate the 
burden placed on Debian, etc., of having to figure out the exact 
requirement of each individual license.

Justin

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