[License-discuss] License which requires watermarking? (Attribution Provision)

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Richard Fontana (rfontana at redhat.com):

> On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 12:34:33AM -0500, Richard Fontana wrote:
> > I believe that the OSI's approval of CPAL (the license you may be
> > intentionally not naming) was, in retrospect, wrongly decided.
> 
> To be fair, and to spread the blame around, the FSF's decision that
> CPAL is a free software license was also wrongly decided, as was the
> Fedora Project's decision that CPAL was free for purposes of Fedora
> (which appears to be my fault -- sorry Tom!). I believe Debian treats
> CPAL as DFSG-free but whether this was a wrong decision depends on
> whether a decision was actually made, I suppose.

I respect your view on the matter.

At the time, FWIW, I was among those who found CPAL to be only minimally
noxious and only mildly infringing on OSD #6 (fields of endeavour)
freedoms, and basically felt it to be a questionable licence likely to
remain obscure but so much better than the other slop that Matt Asay et
alii were trying to cram down everyone's throat that it could be given a
chance without significant harm to anyone.  And I note that it was a
flash in the pan, pretty much -- worse and sneakier badgeware vehicles
like GPLv3 + restrictive 'Additional Terms' having emerged right around
the same time.  So, our collective desire to be accomodating (if that's
what it was) did not avail.

(I'm writing this off the cuff at the end of a long day, and may well be
neglecting important aspects.  Sorry.)