@evan

@cwebber it is for these reasons we need something better than open source. An ethical open license.

Reading this I am reminded of some time when parts of Linux took code from BSDs without attribution. It was a while ago, the "eyerolls are insufficient for the level of exasperation" feels when they WANT their code to be (re)used by others, yet y'know, cite your sources, plz, kthx bai.

I think maybe it was eventually resolved? I recall some discourse about maybe setting up a BSD violations.org domain similar in spirit to gpl-violations.org as well.

(This anecdotal tale brought to you by being around and doing the work, decades ago, and my frail human memory which seems more error prone than many computational forms of memory retention and retrieval resulting in imprecision when contending with recollection.)

@cwebber IME it's a certain demographic of people who can afford not caring about attribution, and it's one that's very dominant in FLOSS circles… and one that never had to worry about someone just confidently restating their points/work and get all the credit. 🫠

@cwebber To add to everything else everyone has said, attribution also helps anyone who's been inspired by or curious about a work.

Knowing where someone picked up an idea from, or what their major influences were, or even just spotting a familiar name in the 'special thanks', can unlock a whole new area to discover, or a whole range of connections that further explain that one thing about the whole.

But we can't all be in film school or studying music theory. And sometimes it just helps for a creator to say definitively 'yeah I got this idea from here'.

(Attribution also helps to cover the places where something more formal isn't required and it's somehow a problem to go above and beyond, or where formal recognition is for some reason not an option or too difficult to do, or even where someone doesn't want that formal recognition for whatever reason. It's respectful, polite, and acknowledges what helped make something exist.)

@cwebber
#sharealike trained models should be qat trained models of all sizes as #openweights . Ttbh.

@cwebber Yes attribution is very important to me. Ideas and creations don't come out of nowhere. They evolve from prior work. Attributing reflects that reality. It helps to build trust and to connect people.

@cwebber right; I still remember how proud I was when I first read a "Thanks to /me" in a changelog or bug report or something. and I try to follow this path myself.
(I do care about licenses but that's a different topic.)

@cwebber "i just don't want someone to take my name off my code" is absolutely something i've said to people before.

(1/2) IMO @cwebber has made a strawperson argument, because I don't know anyone (at least, anyone who is serious about #FOSS policy & how its impacted by LLM-gen-AI) who says “nobody cares about attribution requirements”.

I can only speak for my own position, but my position (based on 30 years of community observation) is that (a) attribution is not particularly important to most *who choose **non**-copyleft, & (b) attribution *alone* never had a particularly good enforcement hook.

#AI #LLM

@cwebber I care about attribution. More so than in the past. Now that the fruits of our commons labour are being sucked into the genAI blender, sold back to the commons without consent nor attribution I try to be precise in giving proper attribution. I wish @creativecommons had stood up in enforcing attribution. Sadly they did not. Nor did other organisations afaik.

Makes me wonder what will be left of copyright. Will it solely be a right for the rich & powerful? Maybe it already was? 🤔

@cwebber having unwittingly become an expert in a certain cursed project, I say: attribution is SUPER IMPORTANT.

The cursed project when it was announced tried to hide they were based on ATproto, then launched and quietly went closed-source à la Truth Social.

And whenever they use other people’s tools built on ATproto, they are TERRIBLE at crediting them. Ouuuuuuf!

@cwebber I’ve always been surprised when I hear people say that given how many people clearly value it!

@cwebber I, for one, mainly care about proper attribution. Aside from MIT/BSD and LGPL for software, most all the #3DPrinting designs i publish go up under CC BY 4.0.

Attribution is key.

@cwebber I definitely think sharing credit for where I got an idea is super important! I do appreciate when I receive it, but definitely think I care more about making sure I give the proper credit.

@cwebber

I'd say I mostly care about attribution for my own projects in the same manner that I care about copyleft. I want software to be an unmistakably social endeavour, and I think attribution is a piece of that goal in addition to copyleft. I weigh copyleft a little higher because it makes up more of the pieces of my ideals by number, but I think attribution is very important as well. It's important to see code in its social context.

@cwebber I care heavily about attribution because that's the way you trace back to who's responsible for a piece of code. You can't enforce any other requirements if you can't identify who the code came from, and you end up taking the heat for any problems.

@cwebber Attribution's probably the most important part: it's how we can trace the history of programs because the Ladies of the Chips know programmers are pretty bad about recording our own history.

@cwebber from my academic /scientific background: attribution is critical of you want to build on a body of knowledge. You need to be able to find historic sources. Building on software source code is similar to building on previous scientific research in enough ways that citations are essential.

@cwebber I’m starting to feel that building open source licences on copyright was the right idea but the wrong foundation, and that we should have based them on the concepts of academic misconduct and plagiarism, which, when wielded properly, can ruin the career of a rogue who chooses to ignore the licence.

@cwebber hard agree.

@cwebber My history is in both academic computer science and physics, and in both fields attribution is *paramount*. Reviewers will, correctly, hold papers back from publication if work isn't cited properly, especially if it's the reviewer's own work :)

Of course in practice some things things slip by, work is stolen between peers and between professors and students all the time, but the intention is understood and important.

This inability to cite is perhaps the first thing that bothered me about LLMs. Code isn't cited, books and articles aren't cited, websites and blogs aren't cited (in addition to stealing meaningful traffic from them while paradoxically hammering them with scraping requests). It all goes to these companies' fundamental business model, which of course boils down to capitalism's standard procedure - steal the commons, then sell it back to us.

@cwebber

I have a project repository that started out as a fork and eventually morphed into a project that was reworked into something beyond the original scope to become something new.

I still have attributions to the original author and posted the links to the previously forked repository. It was the spark, after all, and it is just as relevant in the timeline as it was when it was the origin.

Given that the project is a list (in this case, a blocklist), it can't really be copyrighted.

@cwebber +1 to all of the above. Attribution is just so cheap to do, it's a red flag when it's too much effort for somebody.

@cwebber

I feel somewhat different about the whole issue, and I want to underline something:

Permissive licenses are about developer freedom, but copyleft licenses are about user freedom. I care about user freedom more than developer freedom.

Another angle is, if I create a tool/library and I share it for free, it's GPLv3. User freedom is non-negotiable plus, I don't want my free work to be sold to anyone. It's created to be free as in beer and as in speech.

I don't allow otherwise.

@cwebber I hate copyright but want some credit for stuff I do, cuz that's the coolest thing someone can give me for the work I do for fun. So, the thing I care about the most is attribution, and that is why I license my stuff copyfree. If I didn't care, I would license it public domain, but attribution feels kinda like praise; I made something useful enough for someone to use, and I know that because they are attributing me

@cwebber attribution is literally the only possible reward when you give your software away for free. It's all there is, so it's all that matters.

@cwebber It is an interesting thought & problem.

The issue with any licensing is firstly enforceability & legality. Just because you put something in a license file doesn't mean you can enforce (as in courts would rule in your favour).

Big OSS licenses have the advantage of being legally verified and supported by precedent.

@cwebber

I tend to release things under ISC/MIT/BSD (2-clause) type licenses because attribution is nice—theoretically required by the licenses—and more significant to me than any share-alike terms. But in the end, I'm more interested in solving problems and sharing those solutions. And similar to @datarama's insightful reply, "as long as 1. you don't claim that you made my work, 2. you don't claim that I made your work."

@cwebber and I feel some people really tell on themselves with their attitudes towards consent and truth

@cwebber i don’t code in any meaningful sense (thankfully) but unless the point is some sort of ephemeral anonymity, attribution is generally the thing i care most about with the art i do put out into the world.

@cwebber I care about attribution

@cwebber absolutely, attribution is the most important part of the whole thing. Citing your sources seems to me to be one of the most basic parts of human decency.

@cwebber i'm an artist/academic/educator and i consider making foss to be a part of my practice. any kind of attribution helps me to make the case that my work has "impact" which in turn helps me to keep my job. a lot of foss projects that are related to academia in some way will request that papers resulting from research that makes use of the project include an actual bibliographical citation—i assume for similar reasons. tbh i think this prominent foss person is full of it

@cwebber attribution seems like the most basic social reciprocity available and, as you mentioned, probably the most important. "where did you get *awesome idea from*? "oh *awesom idea* came from *this person*. aren't they neat?"

@cwebber Too many folks in and around FOSS think "nobody has taken enforcement action over this, therefore nobody actually cares about it." It's wrong and it signals that the person is thinking about FOSS in terms of what they can extract rather than a collaboration among peers.

@cwebber I share a similar stance. While I strongly prefer share-alike provisions, attribution is by far the most important. When I chose my preferred post-floss license1, I chose one2 that has no share-alike clause, but does have an attribution one.

1. Because while I like the idea of FLOSS, I absolutely do not like that I can't restrict who can use my software. ↩︎

2. Filthy Human Hands ↩︎

@cwebber I've always considered it to be important to respect even when it is optional. Tangerine had an attribution page that reproduced the license/copyright notices for the entire dependency graph. I had all the dependencies vendored, so the page was generated automatically from the sources. Mollytime will have a similar feature (eventually) once we're done rebuilding the UI and I figure out a way to do it without vendoring everything.

@cwebber attribution is the single most valuable thing a person or a project could get imho. But i guess this is due to the fact the most of the tech persons in the past were either academics or people with high hacker ethics. I miss the times were tech especially in opensource was about getting the badge to be a smartass or a project everyone looks up to. Nowadays even opensource projects just try to be funded or bought by a third party

@cwebber What if the attribution is then done to every piece of training data? That's not impossible if the training data is known, but will it be acceptable?

@cwebber yep. same 👍️

@cwebber attribution in licenses is how UC Berkeley brought down AT&T and the UNIX System Labs.

@cwebber What I've found, at least in writing, is that people want to be recognized for what they've made, and properly credited.

@cwebber I agree. I extremely dislike copyright (and would like it to be abolished even if that makes copyleft licenses (even more) useless), but I think that attribution and often also proper citation/references is extremely important.