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

[Craig Muth]

Nicholas Goodman wrote:
> 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)

The value is that the project was released as open source in the first
place.  Some people must believe that the attribution-license projects
in question have value, judging by their large numbers of users.  If
you're a company that does customer service and it's either Seibol or
SugarCRM, whose source you can download, modify, and use for free, you
probably think SugarCRM has tremendous value.

An approved attribution clause could possibly result in more useful
code being released as open source, rather than as shareware etc.,
especially where the code is maintained by a person or small group and
tends to be focused on a very specific idea or component.  However,
the preferred option for projects of large scope and with large
committer bases will likely remain the unmodified GPL (the
contributions by a large number of committers benefits you by
improving your code and makes your contribution less by proportion,
thus outweighing the lack of credit given and making attribution less
deserved).

--Craig Muth