[License-discuss] Thoughts on AAL and OSS vs FOSS

[Lukas Atkinson]

On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 at 20:41, Syed Arsalan Hussain Shah
<arsalan at buddyexpress.net> wrote:

> Regarding ALL
>
> Josh claims that there is no repository on github
> https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-March/021667.html
>
> But the
> https://github.com/search?q=attribution+assurance+license&type=Code gives
> me so many respostiores and I beleive AAL is widely used License.
>

Amazingly, most AAL uses I see on Github have silently modified the license
to remove the GPG requirement (which nearly no one complies with anyway?
[1]). And most of the modified AALs seem to be in old forks of InvoiceNinja
software or Attendize? Neither is the license particularly widely used, nor
are many people using the license as currently approved.

My guess is that at most 100 primary authors on Github use the license, as
based on a query [2] looking only at license files, excluding one prolific
author, three frequently forked projects, and excluding the keyword
“Affero” to detect license databases. Libraries.io lists ~250 packages
using the AAL [3], but there seem to be severe data quality issues.

[1]:
https://github.com/search?q=%22attribution+assurance+license%22+%22BEGIN+PGP+SIGNED+MESSAGE%22&type=Code
[2]:
https://github.com/search?q=%22attribution+assurance+license%22+filename%3ALICENSE+NOT+Attendize+NOT+%22Hillel+Coren%22+NOT+clipbucket+NOT+craterapp+NOT+Affero&type=Code
[3]: https://libraries.io/licenses/AAL


> > I have to add, I find it pretty ironic that your own site uses an
> attribution based license, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
> International License :)
>

The problem isn't attribution – nearly every open source license requires
some copyright-like attribution notices to be shown. If you want a license
that handles attributions very well and fairly, consider Apache 2.0 with
its NOTICE file mechanism.
The problem is that the AAL perverts the idea of reasonable attribution
into a problematic requirement to carry advertising-like attributions in a
prominently visible place.

Attribution means different things in different licenses.
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