Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Ethical Legitimacy of Attribution. Was: GFDL with Invariant Sections or other unmodifiable parts. Was: Final Thesis: H-node

[Michał Masłowski]

> But the real problem is
> the educational consequences about the motivation a work should have in
> a free and cooperative society.  Enforcing credit is just selfishness
> that affects the whole world perpetuating the egoism ideal and
> supporting the oligarchy of original authors.

Doesn't science now work by delaying publication of ideas until they are
"complete" enough to be attributed to the original author?  I think it's
too a useful argument here.  (In the 19th century Peter Kropotkin used
the same argument against patents, I don't remember seeing it in recent
anti-software patents articles.)

> For sure it is a big presumptuousness from an
> author to predict that every derivative work, for his work, fits that
> category.  So, the author of each derivative work is who must decide
> that question for his particular derivative work.

The free software definition requires software authors to allow running
the program for any user's purpose (not developer's purpose), we need
the same for other freedoms and other kinds of works.  There is another
well-known case of such restrictions being accepted: developers deciding
that their works are useful only in fonts or documentation choose
GPL-incompatible licenses like the OFL or FDL preventing some useful
derived works from being distributed.

How should copyleft be handled without required attribution?  (We need
it to prevent derived works from being restricted by not sharing sources
or using DRM.)  I think there is no fundamental conflict between
copyleft and anonymity, while all implementations would have similar
issues to required attribution.

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