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

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!!!

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

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.