OSL 3.0 section 6 ["Attribution Rights"]

[Joel West]

Larry,

While I certainly understand why this sort of clause is essential for some firms, isn't this the same sort of issue as the much-hated (now defunct) BSD advertising clause? On page 82 you say "such advertising demands are no longer acceptable..." (quote taken out of context)

Do you anticipate getting similar criticism of this clause, either from the OSI board in approving the license, or from f/oss partisans in general?

Joel


On 11:01 AM -0700 8/11/05, Lawrence Rosen doth scribe:
>This condition regarding attribution is important to some. Consider the
>SugarCRM license at
>http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/open-source/public-license.html which imposes
>the "Additional Terms" at Exhibit B. (That license has not yet been formally
>approved by OSI, by the way.)

...

>The proposed new sentence in OSL
>3.0 deals more broadly with copyright, patent and trademark notices in
>whatever form the work is distributed. It requires that the original
>authors' notices remain visible whenever a new distributor's notices are
>displayed. The proposed new sentence reads as follows:
>
>   Unless You obtain a separate license or a waiver of this sentence
>   from the Licensor, (i) You must display Licensor’s copyright and
>   patent notices on copies of the Original Work and Derivative Works
>   that You distribute, in the same places and with the same prominence
>   as You display Your own copyright and patent notices, and (ii) You must
>   display a statement to the effect that “Your work is a Derivative Work
>   of Licensor’s Original Work licensed under the Open Software License
>   version 3.0” in copies of Derivative Works that You distribute, in the
>   same places and with the same prominence as You display Your own
>   trademarks.
>
>Strictly speaking, this new sentence does not actually require any author or
>distributor to display copyright, patent or trademark notices anywhere in
>particular. (Remember, though, that the first two sentences of Section 6
>already require certain notices in the Source Code!) But with this new
>sentence, if a downstream distributor elects to display its own copyright,
>patent and trademark notices on splash screens or "Help About" messages, for
>example, it must provide equivalent notices of the original authors as well.