Free?

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, October 23, 2011 14:26:34 Don wrote:
> On 23.10.2011 00:28, Sean Kelly wrote:
> > It's annoying as it means a pass through the documentation team for
> > distributed software, but whatever.  At least it's usable. Personally,
> > my favorite is the Boost license, and I'm just about to the point where
> > I don't even care about source code attribution for my own work.
>
> Yes. I don't see why it's necessary at all. To take somebody's code and
> pretend that you wrote it, is plagiarism. You don't need a license to
> tell you that.

But you probably do need a license in order to protect it in court. If people 
were going to just pay attention to right and wrong with this sort of thing, a 
lot of licenses would never have been needed in the first place (some like the 
GPL might still need to exist to insist that you give back rather than simply 
not claiming that you wrote it, but many of the OSS licensing center around 
making sure that you don't claim that you wrote something that you didn't). 
Still, it's pretty sad when you think about it.

One nice use for the names attributions though - completely beyond the legal 
ramifications - is that it makes it easier to know who wrote something so that 
you can contact them if you need to (though since it doesn't include contact 
information beyond the name, that only gets you so far).

- Jonathan M Davis