On Wed, May 19, 2004 at 03:18:05AM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> A clause which says you must credit the original author using the
> following text, is not okay.
>
> That one neatly and clearly classifies the vast majority of the
> licenses we are confronted with (it's the counterpart to "say WHAT you
> want, not HOW you want it" - licenses should be specifications, not
> solutions).
By the way, this is also a bit of an overgeneralization--lots of
licenses specify what text must be used, eg. the original 4-clause
BSD license:
"All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software
must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes
software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its
contributors."
and the Apache license:
3. The end-user documentation included with the redistribution,
if any, must include the following acknowledgment:
"This product includes software developed by the
Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/)."
Alternately, this acknowledgment may appear in the software itself,
if and wherever such third-party acknowledgments normally appear.
These are obnoxious; if the entirety of my documentation is in French, I
wouldn't want to have to have acknowledgements in English. It isn't
unfree, though. (This is probably mostly a case of people following the
bad example set by the above licenses ...)
(I don't know of any of these that require the text be output to the terminal.)
FWIW:
10:15pm [EMAIL PROTECTED]/2 [/usr/share/doc] grep -m 1 -i 'the following ack'
*/copyright | wc -l
93
--
Glenn Maynard
