Re: notification requirements [was Re: MPL Alpha 1 Draft Released]

  On 8/19/10 11:04 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
> On 8/19/10 11:16 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
>
>> My personal experience is that virtually no one reads documentation, so
>> that any requirements pertaining to documentation don't actually do much
>> to help give credit.
>
> I pretty strongly agree with this. No one reads docs. And for a 
> project/software of any size, having license-required credits can 
> easily result in a wall of text, who wants to read that? Credits feel 
> like an issue orthogonal to core FOSS principles.
I still remember showing my grandmother that 'wall of text' the first 
time I got in one, so I wouldn't discount it altogether. It is too easy 
for those of us who are lucky enough to do this full time to forget the 
impact of this kind of thing on volunteers.

It may be most productive to discuss what the outcome should be when a 
healthy project (with presumably good contributor recognition practices) 
is forked by a third party without a community connection. Think of the 
license as a mandatory minimum, designed to cover that case, while the 
best practices of healthy projects would go beyond that, but not be 
mandated by the license.

Luis

-- 
Luis Villa, Mozilla Legal
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