[Fwd: FW: For Approval: Generic Attribution Provision]

[Nicholas Goodman]

> copacetic to Open Source.  My intuition is that giving credit to authors
> is cheap for the value it provides, even if we're talking about screen

Can someone help articulate the "value it provides" to me?  It provides
compulsory advertising so I can see how that is valuable to the licensor
but how is it valuable to Open Source?  What benefits does attribution
(badgeware, anywhere, anytime) provide the user?  Other than the
"opportunity" to buy services from the holder of the badge, does this
signal some sort of certification?  Some sort of origin without
tampering (NO)?  The only value at all is to the licensor who gets free
advertising out of the deal.  I think it's a farce to say badgeware is
anything except companies (and more rarely individuals) trying to
monetize code they've distributed with additional constraints and
stipulations on distribution.  All the hundreds of millions of open
source to date, and attribution in source and docs is OK to them.  Let's
be honest, this isn't about giving "credit" it's about advertising.
Giving credit is very much in line with open source ideas (docs, source,
startup, about box, etc) and is ALREADY permitted.  

The only value I see, is that it would bring people who don't really
want to write open source to the "open source" movement by allowing them
to gain commercial value from forced attribution (advertising).  ie, we
can add more code/applications to "open source" if we broaden that
definition.

What am I missing?  What do the USER, COMMUNITY, and WORLD get out of
badgeware other than more startups popping out more pseudo open source
applications?  (ie, Free to use software)

Nick
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