Credit and Free Software

Hans Reiser - you're thinking ReiserFS, and you'd be right - has a proposal to slather Free Software with credits for its authors. Good? Bad? This is something the community has generally moved away from, but maybe Reiser has a good point. Newsforge is part of OSDN.

Comments

Re:the purpose of free software for many IS credit

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite. And anyone who puts their own name in the name of their software, Mr Reiser "of ReiserFS fame", has pretty blatant opinions on modesty that he really didn't need to write a whole article about to reveal.

Give 'em credit!

[rice_burners_suck]

Listen. The authors wrote the software. They did so with the knowledge that it would be distributed freely (as in libremente) and as such they would probably not make any money off it. Despite this, they have put a lot of effort, blood, sweat and tears into making something that is reasonably functional, efficient and safe to use. I know exactly how difficult it is to produce good software.

The way I see it, the authors deserve to have credits all over the free software that they made. And when you run free software, don't tell yourself that it's your right to take someone else's work and use it "just because." You have the right to use it because THEY gave you that right.

Re:Give 'em credit!

[Skyshadow]

And when you run free software, don't tell yourself that it's your right to take someone else's work and use it "just because." You have the right to use it because THEY gave you that right.

While that's true on it's face, I would counter that making the fruits of your labor available to others in the community is not an entirely selfless act.

Really, quality OSS projects are not the work of a single person. They're the result of wide-ranging teams who, thanks to the GPL, are able to apply many eyes, ideas and approaches. That's the whole strength of OSS.

Now, I do believe it's important to give credit to those who work hard, but I also believe it's futile to toss credits in the face of someone who doesn't give a toss (and not giving a toss is a right the GPL gives you, as well).

This sucks.

[I Am The Owl]

Like someone else mentioned above, this is not free software. If you write software that throws a bunch of credits in people's face all the time (the screensaver idea is an awful one), distros will be inclined not to use your software by default if the license forces the issue. Imagine if business contributes to a free software project and then insists that the business be "given credit" by putting their name all over the place. But then I see ReiserFS doing just that: last time I formatted a ReiserFS partition, I got a list of all the companies that contributed money to the project. Don't get me wrong, ReiserFS is great, but I don't care to see a bunch of ads in my software. Imagine if every time you ran ls you got some companies name listed along with your directory listing.

Free software is not about egos, it is about keeping software free. Forcing something like this through licensing makes the software non-free. Want the credits? Look at the source code or the documentation!!!

Re:This sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

But then I see ReiserFS doing just that: last time I formatted a ReiserFS partition, I got a list of all the companies that contributed money to the project.

Note to self: Never ever ever use ReiserFS.

For any reason.

Period.

Good idea, but...

[ectospasm]

I don't think it's enforcible. If you make giving credits a requirement to use such-and-such a license, a developer will just create a new license without that restriction.

And, you'd have balkanization on how it should be implemented. Boot messages? Splash screens? If users get annoyed with these, they'd want to turn them off, and someone would find a way to do so. If a user wants to know who wrote a piece of free software, many times this is not difficult to obtain.

I guess I just see it as being unenforcible and unnecessary.

For God�s sake, just get off the screen!

[pabtro]

From the article:

"I propose that we as a community insist that all distros make the default screensaver be one that randomly displays a different detailed credit for one of the authors of Linux software every 60 seconds."

This will certainly be the doom for open source software, specially Linux. Would you, or any company use software that displayed beards and glasses every minute? Let me answer that for you: -For God's sake, I'll pay for It! just get off the screen!

I write code, that's it.

[taxtropel]

I don't need people to see me in some splashs screen. In fact I presonaly hate splas screens, and remove them from every opensource project I use. It would be nice to see an "about" dialog w/ credit to thoes who helped, but to make something like that mandatory is rather asburd, and pointless. An example situation is found above; The developers will just make a new liscens w/o the "credit clause". Mr. Reiser isn't the first to suggest this, but his FS is used by many (not me tho, I don't like it)

Re:OSS belongs to the community

[tomstdenis]

Belong to the community... yeah sure my ass.

As an OSS developer myself I feel everyone is entitled to use a copy of my stuff for whatever they want. I don't feel they "own" the project though.

I mean a lot of work goes into something like a Distro [or the stuff in a Distro]. Just because you're smart enough to put a CD in and install a distro doesn't mean you're a significant contributor.

I'm all for tasteful plugging authors names.

Tom

Re:Haven't We Been Here Before

[Ed Avis]

On the other hand, one of the big advantages of free software is that you can find a *named person* responsible for each line of code and if necessary contact that person directly, rather than some moronic 'helpline'. So the list of credits should definitely be there... But I don't agree that this goal, however desirable, should be enforced by licensing.

Adobe Photoshop

[exhilaration]

Nobody's brought up the Photoshop splash screen - which lists quite a number of the developers, but in a very tasteful manner. I remember it because the first time I saw it, I thought to myself, "Cool, a lot of Indians were involved in this."

I think a good way to credit a large number of developers, is to make a splash screen with the bottom quarter scrolling the names of authors/contributors. The user would simply have to click to proceed. That's unobtrusive and might even generate some interest in the user - who might one day stop and read the whole list.

Or perhaps instead of requiring a click, have the splash screen time out after a few seconds, but put a button on it labeled "click here for the credits!" - again unobtrusive.

But that still doesn't take care of stuff that doesn't have a GUI - like ReiserFS.

"Most prominently displayed" clause

[Animats]

If this is done (and I don't have a strong opinion on that one way or the other yet), the way to do it is to insist that the names of the authors be displayed at least as prominently as any other information relating to the distribution and packaging of the software. If a program displays no sign of branding, that's fine. If it displays "Red Hat", it has to display the names of the authors with equal or greater prominence.

Remember "MacPaint by Bill Atkinson"?. For years, that appeared at the top of every MacPaint window.

2 points

[mhesseltine]

One, I'm currently in the process of re-reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by ESR. In it, he discusses how ego boosting is by nature frowned upon. I'm surprised that Hans has felt compelled to take this point up.

Two, as others have pointed out, there are plenty of ways for authors to get recognition in a project.

1. About screens
2. Help screens
3. README files
4. Man pages
5. Web pages
6. Mailing lists
7. Developer forums (sourceforge for example)

Bottom line: grow up Hans.

P.S. random "unknown" hackers

• Larry Wall
• Linus Torvalds
• Richard Stallman
• Andrew Tigdell
• Guido van Rossum

But Hans is right, programmers don't get credit for their work. /remove tongue from cheek

I support giving credits, but...

[GrimReality]

I agree with Hans about the academic culture's value of giving credits. However, there are two points worth mentioning.

1. Effective ways to give credit already exists:
   • AUTHORS and/or CREDITS file (also README): These come with practically all GNU projects, and shows up in the system documentation folders. At least, this is true with most Debian packages, and has to be true with other distributions since it seems to be something that the upstream author puts there.

   • About Dialogue: This is another place where they have credits showing at least the name of the main authors and the current maintainer. For instance:

     ZZZZ@quark:~$ chown --version
     chown (fileutils) 4.1
     Written by David MacKenzie.
     
     Copyright (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc. This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE
2. This could be counter-productive
   • From a personal perspective, I don't want my favourite developers been seen by others as egotisical monsters. Which is probably what will happen if people who care less about the authors (most users, especially the crowd we hope to convert from Windows [please don't consider this a stereotyping of Windows users but this what I have seen]) think if they are forced to read all the name every time they use a software.
   • Some of Hans Reiser's favourite licences seem to favour closing the source, which eventually means withdrawing the credits section after they claim that it is a full rewrite. Or maybe, this crdits only apply to the open-source world--maybe it is the reward for caring to look.

Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-05-03 19:54:57 UTC (2003-05-03 15:54:57 EDT)

Pardon my stupidity.
(Score: -10x10^128, Pro-Free-Software)

Re:Points not to be discounted lightly

[brianosaurus]

Stallman is very well known, but I can't recall any software he's written other than GNU Emacs. While Emacs alone is a pretty huge contribution, I know there is more that he has done, I just don't know what it is.. and its probably stuff I use all the time.

I think at the root of this is the whole "GNU/Linux" vs "Linux" debate, as that is one of the most prominent cases of not giving credit where credit is due. When that issue was covered on "Revolution OS", Stallman made a very good argument that there are thousands of people contributing GNU software which supports the Linux kernel to make an OS distribution, but GNU gets no credit. Linus's truly brilliant, and well though out response: its mine, so i call it Linux.

Re:Points not to be discounted lightly

[awol]

People that don't read the source code arent the sort of people who are likely to rember names IMO. (Or care about names generaly for that matter)

No way. In the new world order where IP goes away, your reputation as a contributor to software will be your stock in trade. It will be the means by which you price your services to those that would consume them from projects to emplyers. It is absolutely critical that software is correctly attributed and that it should be easy and proiminant.

You see someone who takes attributed code and claims it as their own is committing fraud an ancient wrong that is straightforward to prosecute. The commercial damage to one so wronged is an intruiging question but once the value of reputation in this new order is understood then the value of such damage will be eaiser to understand, both in terms of the private actionable wrong but also the public policy issue in ensuring that work is attributed accurately and completely.