For Approval: Common Public Attribution License (CPAL)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Matthew Flaschen (matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu):

> "Prominent" is flexible, but only to a point.  The logo can be small and
> briefly displayed, but not too small or brief because "the display
> [must] be of sufficient duration to give reasonable notice".  I.E. if a
> reasonable user wouldn't be able to notice all the attributions, they
> aren't prominent.

As brief meta-commentary, I do agree with the concern about logo
accumulation in derivative works, and have voiced it myself, _but_ feel
that some sense of proportion should be applied, in judging the proper
extent of that concern.  Yes, an important aim of open source is to make
code borrowing lawful and practical (to the extent that licence
compatibility allows), but, realistically, Nicholas Goodman's
logo-overload scenario is (even under the early badgeware licenses with
fixed-size logos on every page) a severe (yet amusing) over-exaggeration
of what could ever _actually_ happen in the real world.

In the real world, derivative works from ten-plus badgeware-licensed
Web apps would seem extremely unlikely:  Old code _does_ get junked or
totally rewritten over time (except in chthonian COBOL underworlds, I
guess), rather than remaining eternally like a fossil inclusion to
bedevil engineers and company lawyers.  

I'm trying to say:  Let's be tolerant of licence-created problem scenarios 
that seem, at best, on the far end of "unlikely to actually occur".

-- 
Cheers,                English is essentially a text parser's way of getting 
Rick Moen              faster processors built.
rick at linuxmafia.com    -- John M. Ford, http://ccil.org/~cowan/essential.html