[Fsf-friends] COMMENT: Slap the credits everywhere

[Frederick Noronha (FN)]

URL :  http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/04/28/1859244

     Slap the credits everywhere!

   Friday May 02, 2003 - [ 03:00 PM GMT ]   [20] Print this Article 
   Topic - [21]Open Source

   - by [22]Hans Reiser - 
   Free software is ego-propelled. People don't get paid, they get
   famous. Yet we as a community do far too little to prominently credit
   the names of the authors. I propose we change that by adopting a few
   simple practices.

   Free software is like radio and broadcast television -- easily
   accessible and available to anyone who wants it. As software
   programming gets to be as big as entertainment programming, it begins
   to copy it in other ways. We should consciously pick which of those
   ways we want and as a community create taboos to enforce them now
   before we drift into bad habits that take become de facto rules.

   Do we want free software projects to be as well-funded as soap operas?
   It would be nice if it were so.

   Do we want ads inserted into people's screen backgrounds suggesting
   they lose weight and look stylish by smoking Camels? I think not.

   Do we want people to know the names of the authors of all of the
   software that they frequently use? Sure -- it would result in more and
   harder-working authors.

   I propose that we as a community insist that all distros make the
   default screensaver be one that randomly displays a different detailed
   credit for one of the authors of Linux software every 60 seconds. I
   propose that we insist the default splash screen for booting also
   display a random detailed credit describing the software one of the
   authors wrote.

   I think we should make this crediting of authors a license requirement
   for our free software. Why is it necessary to make it a license
   requirement? Won't everyone just go along with it if it is a good
   idea?

   If you think that, you have not met many marketeers in suits. To a
   marketeer, consumer awareness is money, and there is no reason why
   anybody but their company should have any. Their job is to ensure that
   they get the highest possible fraction of consumer awareness.

   Marketeers tightly control credits on their products so that only the
   company gets credit on anything they can control. This is why distros
   install splash screens with their name and no one else's on them into
   kernels they mostly did not write. The splash screens serve the
   purpose of emphasizing their brand name and obscuring everyone else's.
   A very minor reason, but the only one they speak of publicly, is that
   it obscures information average users don't understand with a nice
   graphic by a third-rate corporate artist. (Anyone else think we ought
   to have an open art contest for that boot splash screen?)

   This is why distros drop the K from all the KDE programs: somebody
   else is trying to establish a brand name, and that is a market threat
   they want to cut off. This is why they change the user interface of
   desktops they didn't write to display their logo instead of the
   desktop authors' logos.

   Using the work of others without giving them credit is plagiarism.
   Academia has long had in place mechanisms for dealing with plagiarism
   and other failures to attribute. In academia, authors' work is
   examined by an independent review board before publication. If you
   don't attribute, your reviewers laugh at you, you have to add the
   attribution, and you might not get published at all if the error was
   not an honest one. There is a constant continuing struggle to catch
   failures to attribute, but the social mechanism is in place and fairly
   effective.

   By contrast, with free software publishing, the distros -- and
   appliance vendors -- determine the proper share of the credit. Because
   the distros have a vested interest in their brand, they don't even
   bother to try to give appropriate credit to the creative talent, let
   alone the people and companies that fund the work. Perhaps you think
   that those who contribute only money should get less mention than
   those contributing code? I disagree. Have you ever worked a day job to
   fund other coders? Pure hell, let me tell you, especially if you are
   also so essential that time off becomes unacceptable. Money is
   unimportant only to those who don't work to create it.

   Steps in the right direction

   This proposal is just the first round of struggle over this issue.
   There are going to be lots of issues to solve in the details of how
   authors ensure that their credits are not stripped out of their work.

   For instance, how do you define what is fair crediting if there are
   many authors? What if you don't agree with someone's assessment of
   what is their fair share of the credits? Do you either suffer with it
   or do without their software? This is not a new problem -- or don't
   you think actors argue over the size of their name on the screen?

   At some point we'll need an arbitrator to solve these disputes. At
   first, this will probably be the original author, but since the
   original author is not disinterested, it will eventually need to be
   someone else. Original authors who name their software after
   themselves (ahem) have an advantage as an arbitrator of credits in
   that it is easier for them to worry less about their presence in the
   rest of the credits. (I encourage more people to do as Linus and I
   have done. It is mostly the guys working for me who need the kind of
   mention I'm suggesting if they are to get their deserved due. Naming
   software is the best possible way to credit authors. Look for pieces
   of reiserfs to acquire programmer names in the future.)

   The Free Software Foundation has finally begun to do something about
   giving proper credit. As a prelude to V3 of the GPL, the Free Software
   Foundation has moved to the GNU Free Documentation License. The
   [23]GFDL allows authors to make their credits or their political
   statements irremovable.

   That's a step in the right direction, but what about making the
   credits visible? It seems V3 of the GPL only protects credits in the
   source code, and does nothing to guarantee that users actually see the
   credits of the authors instead of the credits of the marketeers. In
   other words, it is 99% irrelevant. Fewer than 100 people have read the
   source code to reiserfs, and while those 100 are important, they
   aren't as important as 99% of the public. Nobody responsible for
   deciding whether to sponsor us has ever read the source code that I
   know of.

   Protecting credits only in the source is inadequate. If you agree,
   perhaps you can help me influence V3's authors to provide relevant
   protection from plagiarism. If that doesn't happen, I will try to
   convince the community that we need to move to an anti-plagiarism
   license instead.

   Unfortunately there are those who don't want their software burdened
   with even credit for the authors. Debian, for instance, seems to be
   leading the resistance to the GFDL. But maybe this is a burden we
   should shoulder if we want better software. What do you think?

   I would love to see an arbitrator determine who gets what mention on
   the outside of GNU/Linux distribution boxes. When Richard Stallman
   isn't even mentioned on the box as an author because doing so does not
   further the mindshare capture effort of the distro, well, this is just
   wrong. I don't have to agree with Stallman's socio-economics to abhor
   seeing his voice obscured by suits who don't equal his contribution in
   code and leadership. I hope you agree with me.

   Hans Reiser is architect of the Reiser filesystem and founder of
   [24]namesys .