Licensing and giving authorship credit

Quote from: Mark at Apr 10, 2006, 05:00 AM

The way I understand the open source GPL is that you are free to use code bit xyz so long as you release it under the same license, credit the origional author, and provide the entire source code. I don’t believe that it states anywhere that you must notify the author, although doing so is a good idea.

This would be relevant if EtoGal had been released under the GPL licence, but it wasn’t.

Thanks to all those who weighed in. Sorry to have opened a can of worms. There really was no hidden agenda behind my question. I was truly curious about what the accepted practices are because I’m sure I’ll find myself in that boat one of these days where I’d like to take an existing piece of code and do something different things with it than the original author intended or had time to do.

... and now, back to our show!

I certainly hope none of the MODx developers become so prideful and shallow that they start ammending all their work with this sad song:

Copyright statement and explicit licence terms added (a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence). I regret having to do this, but seeing two people using another CMS offering gallery snippets heavily based on hugelmopf’s work on Etogal with no meaningful acknowledgement I have decided to make a stand. If anyone needs a different licence, they are welcome to contact me.

I came from the Etomite camp because I liked the features of modx and I love the communty support.  I was astonished to find that MODx does not require a link to this site be left on each page and I thought, hmm... When you have a superior product, I guess you have to be less worried about "Brand Awareness" and making sure everone pats you on the back and says "oh... what a wonderful program you have written... you are terriffic... and the whole world loves you.  No... It’s not necessary because the product speaks for itself, and from what I have seen, people are so smitten with it that the actively choose to link back to this site.  that speaks volumes on the nature of the two camps.  I think it’s tragic that there is this separation.  we should actively develop together and colaborate for the greater whole.  or we could keep being childish bitches.  whatever you folks like is ok with me I guess.

I would have to disagree with you here, Mike. If somebody writes a program they have every right to put whatever usage license they choose on it. You have the choice to not use it if you don’t care for the terms of the license. And such a thing is not just a "pat on the back" and showing off. Many of us make a livlihood out of our work, and it is necessary to be able to point to examples of our work in order to get more work. We don’t care if the whole world loves us or not, only prospective employers or purchasers of our products!

Quote from: mikeg at Apr 10, 2006, 09:43 AM

I think it’s tragic that there is this separation. we should actively develop together and colaborate for the greater whole.

Tell me please, how do you expect to collaborate when you don’t contact the authors to let them know you are using their work?

And that licence gives you more rights than you had before it was placed there ... unless you believe copyright theft is OK.

mikeg,
I agree with part of what you said, to a point.  The thing you have to remember is that a programmer has every right to release his or her creation under any license they see fit.  case in point; look at all the 3rd party Mambo/Joomla! modules and templates released commercially.  The part of your comment I do agree with is that separation between developers so closely linked in etiology has a great potential to be counter productive to all involved, but it takes all kinds of people to make the world go round, and in the MODx forums, It may be better to lead by example.  Speak respectfully to fellow members, understand that there are bound to be differences in opinions, and if you want to see cooperation, take the first step! Write the next killer snippet and release it in the Etomite forums and the MODx forums.  I cannot think of one member here that will criticize you for that.

welcome to modx!

-sD-
scotty Delicious

@mikef:

I sincerely appologize If you feel that the credit to hugelmopf in the header of the snippet was not enough. If you have a chance today to PM or email me any additional information for the header I would be more than happy to ablige. My modification to the MiniGallery snippet was based of a copy of a copy of a copy originally converted for MODx by another user. I did not modify the header, only parts of the code to allow for lightBox JS popups. I think perhaps some of your posts have come off as rude/insulting/degrading to MODx users. From what I have found here, folks seem to respond incredibly quickly to please and thank you. After all, you attract more flies with honey than vinegar .

later

-sD-

Well, the "attribution-non-commercial" bit is a show-stopper for me. I have no idea who I might want to use such a thing for, and most business clients don’t want to see somebody else’s name plastered all over their site. I went that route once, paying Alex for removing the links on the first Etomite site I built, and still got some over-zealous Eto forum user sending my client a nasty Email. Fortunately the site wasn’t totally finished yet and the contact form was still sending mail to me. Alex wasn’t too happy about that either, since I had been contributing to the Etomite project as well as paying cash.

One of the main reasons I chose to make MODx the core of my efforts is because it doesn’t require a link on any of the outward-facing pages, only the Manager login page. I’ll have to hold out for a truly free gallery snippet, or find and mod-x-ify (or maybe even develop) one.

In case anyone doesn’t know, the *Nuke people went to the GNU-GPL people, and it was officially decided that if a link or other attribution is hard-coded into the source it must be displayed in the output. I objected to this, since it seems to signify that our web pages are "derivitive works", since the GPL specifically excludes output of a program unless it qualifies as a "derived work", and thus must also be licensed GPL. The question is, are our actual HTML web pages being displayed to the browser (other than Manager pages, which are not of our design or content creation) "output" of a CMS (similar to a program from a compiler, or a document from a word processor), or "derived works"? So far I havn’t gotten any answers.

Is it possible for one of the mods here to separate out discussion about my licencing from the minigallery snippet, as the two are unrelated. I haven’t attempted to add that licence to the etoGal snippet, only to a couple of supplementary snippets of mine. If this can be moved to a suitable place, I’m happy to discuss alternative licences (and as it says ... ’if you need an alternative licence, contact me’)
For one of the points Susan has raised, ’attribution’ wasn’t meant to mean a link on every page, just retained in the source. I’ll check.

Heh! The FUD is wild tonight!

Sorry for babbling when I have insufficient information, Mike.