[License-discuss] Open source license with obligation to display an attribution?

[Stephen Michael Kellat]

On Tue, Dec 04, 2018 at 07:53:17PM +0000, Simon.Cox at csiro.au wrote:
> [Apologies - I subscribed in digest mode so my response to your initial comments was not threaded, and this won't be either - fixed now.]
> 
> 
> I guess what we are after is what you have referred to as a 'gesture'. Probably shouldn't have used the term 'obligation' in the subject line - I've been looking at the ODRL model, so am used to thinking in terms of permissions/restrictions/obligations.
> 
> 
> I'm fully aware that - as with pretty much all IP law - enforcement is up to us, so there is always a scalability challenge.  But mention within a license at least provides a starting point. In my initial post it appeared that I was jumping to a solution prior to laying out the requirement, so I attempted to clarify the use-case in a follow-up message.
> 
> 
> What would make our bosses happy (and thus willing to continue to support our contributions) would be: where a site uses our product as the primary basis for a publicly-available service, that a gesture of acknowledgment is publicly-visible. In non-legal English something like "if you use this software as the primary basis for a service with a publicly visible UI, even if under a new skin, whatever, then please acknowledge us on or around your landing page. Our preference would be that you display [this logo] with a link to [our webpage]".
> 
> A standard-ish formulation would be nice.
> 
> Simon J D Cox
> Research Scientist
> Land and Water<http://www.csiro.au/Organisation-Structure/Flagships/Land-and-Water>
> CSIRO

Since I am a fellow bureaucrat but for a different nation's federal government, I may suggest in blunter language my view of what Mr. Cox is suggesting.

A concern with any government agency is ensuring that funding streams remain intact.  My employing bureau in the US Treasury is stuck under interim funding as the Congress continues to fail to pass full year appropriations.  That leads to the absurdity that the sharp, pointy end of the spear has full legal appropriations to spend money while the actual tax collectors could wind up working without pay if something goes haywire in our specific legislation.

Having open source output is a great thing for any organization.  It can be difficult to quantify in a more tangible form when you are facing legislators and ranking agency officials who are considering your budget.  Badgeware would conceptually be a way for agency middle management to try to appease the political layer to better show what the results of all the spending happen to be.  I'm not saying it is a good idea but it is a normal bureaucratic response.

In this particular instance, since CSIRO is the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia, consideration on-list would be best if we looked at examples from the DoD and NASA.  CSIRO is a government agency that does good things.  I learned about them when I was in-region attached to the American Samoa Community College under the government of the Territory of American Samoa.

Mr. Cox can confirm if this is a better restatement of the problem.

Stephen Michael Kellat
Ashtabula, Ohio

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