Reading the comments in Zeeshan Ali’s blog make me a bit sad that the issue of giving credit was somehow brushed aside instead of fomenting a good debate on the nature of credit within our communities. I would have to agree that Zeeshan’s post was a bit polarizing and in any polarized situation people tend to retreat to their corners and bend their arguments around the space they feel they need to defend. For the sake of academics let’s take it from a different angle and examine the nature of credit in GNOME.
Being that no license that is used by GNOME has an attribution clause (besides having to keep copyright notices intact) is it legal not to give attribution in a document which references a licensed work?
Perfectly legal. It has been noted that there are attribution licenses but only one is accepted by the OSI and none are compatible with the GPL or its derivatives.
What about ethical, especially if the author has requested it?
This one is up for debate. If the author has not legally bound you to do so it is correct that it could be needlessly burdensome to list out every contributor in every press release. This is the number one reason why attribution licenses are frowned upon. However it behooves an entity to point out and acknowledge the contributions of others, a topic I will go into later. It is utterly unethical to claim credit for others work or use language that implies such.
Why is credit important then if things can be taken and used legally without attribution?
Like it or not, everyone has their own reasons for contributing to the Open Source ecosystem (shockingly we are a diverse bunch). Far from being the vestige of communism that many people tried to paint the Free Software and Open Source movements in the early days, the ecosystem is a true free market. Remember the free in Free Software is about freedom not price. The price paid for people releasing their code into the wild increasingly these days has been money but is still overwhelmingly supported by code being contributed back, recognition from peers and credit for the time spent not doing something else. To push aside giving people credit for that work that they have done runs the risk that they will not contribute in the future. Credit is the grease that allow our cogs to spin freely. Karl’s contribution to some may seem small but if it wasn’t him would anyone else step up to the to do the same things?
So if putting every author of every package on a press release is prohibitively expensive what should we be doing?
Language and attitude are key here, especially in public. If an author feels they aren’t getting enough credit it is something to look into. Words should spell out what has come from the hard work of external contributors, because if after all we are willing to praise ourselves for our own contributions then acknowledging that we stand on the shoulders of giants shouldn’t be a burden. Blogs and talks are excellent places to give credit. The kernel talks often do this very well even though they can’t list out every contributor, and I recently saw an animation of the development of python that excellently visualized all of the contributors over a period of time.
Credit where, credit is due. It is an important part of our culture. Without it the ecosystem breaks down and that is a large price to pay for not saying thank you. Viva La Upstream!!!
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
Thanks J5,
Let me just say that I admit, my contribution on this was small. The thing that got to me was that Ubuntu were taking credit for it, and even after I asked for them to acknowledge that without a company paying me, I did this off my own bat, purely because I love GNOME, they removed the item rather than acknowledge me.
The fact that they then removed the contribution from their release notes made it apparent that they would rather take credit than give credit.
This was a really good post that made clear the point zenix was making. I didn’t ask him to blog this, and have considered doing so myself, but he asked if I wouldn’t mind if he did. I agreed that it would be OK for him to mention it.
Even my meagre contribution shouldn’t have been presented as if Ubuntu had funded it. I feel they have taken something from me, and I would bet that there are others that feel the same way.
I think its about time Ubuntu acknowledged the fact that their upstream contributions amount to small potatoes in comparison to some of the other companies out there, and that they aren’t “Linux” and they aren’t “GNOME” which is the opinion a lot of their users seem to be carrying.
Comment by Karl Lattimer — June 27, 2008 @ 8:18 pm
“Let me just say that I admit, my contribution on this was small. The thing that got to me was that Ubuntu were taking credit for it,”
Ubuntu does that all the time. Fact is that Canonical’s technical contributions are meagre and looking at the entire Free software ecosystem almost non-existent. As a sign of this, Upstart was written by a employee on his own time despite Canonical claiming copyright on the work.
Greg KH pointed out that they have committed only 6 changes in the past 5 years
http://mmcgrath.livejournal.com/18200.html
It is a problematic attitude for the distribution and the organization behind it to take and their community keeps defending it instead of changing their standpoint and giving proper credit to upstream developers including Red Hat for the massive contributions they have done.
Comment by neo — June 27, 2008 @ 8:43 pm
>The fact that they then removed the contribution from their release notes made it apparent that they would rather take credit than give credit.
OR, they simply wanted to not escalate the situation and start giving credit to everyone in these release notes because it would take them another 10 days to get all the names in there. It’s funny how you only see your own point of view and don’t even try to get to their shoes. If they were to do what you asked them, it would only be fair to attribute every one else, and if they were not to do that, they would have a HUGE problem on their hands with 15 people shouting in the mailing lists and blogs that “boohoo, ubuntu didn’t attributed us too like they did Karl! Why so, are we second class citizens?”
So stop your cry-baby behavior and get freaking real. It’s simply not practical to attribute you in this situation. And if you insisted, it’s better to not mention the feature at all. What they did makes absolute sense.
If you want attribution release your code under the CC-BY license.
Comment by Eugenia — June 28, 2008 @ 4:46 am
Thanks Eugenia for showing how much you only care about your position and for not reading my post and for your ad hominem attacks.
If you had read it you would have noticed that I didn’t place blame on anyone and in fact noted that it is onerous to require attribution on every document which is why attribution clauses are frowned upon. Your one track mind makes any real dialogue impossible.
What I did argue is the importance of credit, phrasing and general respect for upstream. Whether or not one entity or another is following this is irrelevant other than we all need to follow this in order to have a healthy community.
“So stop your cry-baby behavior and get freaking real.” Hmm, where in the news this pass few weeks have I heard this very similar remark before? It speaks volumes to your attitude and has been a phrase oft used to belittle opposition’s complaints without having to address any real issues.
Comment by J5 — June 28, 2008 @ 8:28 am
Eugenia’s first paragraph is correct. Almost all features in the release announcement were created by people not affiliated with Ubuntu. If Karl’s name was put in the announcement, two dozen Gnome hackers would suddenly announce that they were offended because their names are not listed despite their contributions being equally significant. So simply putting Karl’s name in the release notes next to his work was really not an option.
So what should Ubuntu have done? The “correct” options are either
1. include, *at the end of the release notes*, a list of “people who contributed to this release”. Many of them can be just copy/pasted from the Gnome release announcement – but Ubuntu is more than just Gnome, and putting together a complete and accurate list would, I am guessing, be quite a bit of work.
2. Politely inform Karl that “Ubuntu PR has a policy of not listing individual contributors in the release notes, otherwise we risk offending contributors whose names we omit. We want to include the section about the system monitor in the release notes. If you are offended that your name is not listed, we can remove that section. Listing your name is, unfortunately, not an option.”
Did Ubuntu send such an email? I have no idea, ask Karl and the Ubuntu PR team. If they didn’t, and instead simply deleted the section without having some kind of dialogue with Karl, then sure, it was a shitty thing to do.
Comment by alex — June 28, 2008 @ 12:59 pm
> Thanks Eugenia for showing how much you only care about your position and for not reading my post and for your ad hominem attacks.
J5, the above doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Did you read to WHOM I replied? I didn’t reply to your article, I replied to Karl’s comment. Did you not see the quoted sentence in italics? That was Karl’s, not yours. So what exactly is your problem to reply this way to me? By all means refute my points, but don’t make it about your and your blog post. It’s about Karl’s post.
And as for my attitude, well, Karl deserved that attitude when he wanted attribution where no one else was asking for one, and for a piece of code licensed under a license that doesn’t require attribution. So yeah, my attitude was spot on against him.
What really pissed me off is that sentence that I quoted of him above. This man is incapable of putting the shoes of the other guy and think what would it be like if he was on the other side of the fence. And I just can’t stand such people.
Comment by Eugenia — June 28, 2008 @ 3:20 pm
Feel free to feel the same way about me btw. But don’t make it about you and your blog post.
Comment by Eugenia — June 28, 2008 @ 3:22 pm
“If you want attribution release your code under the CC-BY license.”
Read the GPL if and when you have time and you would realize it has attribution requirements too and btw this conversation has nothing to do with legal requirements and everything to do with moral obligations.
Comment by neo — June 28, 2008 @ 4:32 pm
>you would realize it has attribution requirements
Not on that level. The GPL does not ask to give full credit when you write release notes, but it does require it in the copyright notice on the source code itself and main credits of the product. But not on release notes that were put together simply for the convenience of the community.
>with moral obligations
You just don’t get it, re-read my fist comment. If Ubuntu was to give this guy credit in this fashion, then it would be UNFAIR to not give credit to 1000 other contributors too. And doing so is simply impractical. If you want to talk about morality, then you should talk about this to Karl, who is asking for the impossible. What he asks for is very time consuming — which means expensive. And Ubuntu lives on borrowed money, so they can’t afford to give Mr Karl a blow job just because he asks for one.
Really, is it too difficult to understand this, and put your Ubuntu hats for a moment instead of thinking this through only from your own little corner? It should be obvious.
Comment by Eugenia — June 28, 2008 @ 6:11 pm
>What he asks for is very time consuming
Meaning of course that Ubuntu will have to attribute everyone else too, not just Karl.
Comment by Eugenia — June 28, 2008 @ 6:13 pm
I left this comment on Zeeshan’s blog, and don’t see an easy way to link to it so hope you don’t mind me reproducing it here:
I don’t yet have all the facts behind the decision, but I can see that Zeeshan would have reason to be upset if they are as you describe. I can also see that the release managers may have felt it better not to get into a situation where they set a precedent of having to meet every request like this for any feature in a release of GNOME which becomes a release of Ubuntu. I’ve asked the Ubuntu team to let me know what factored into their decision, and will come back to your blog with some answers in due course.
In the meanwhile, I’d like to comment from my own perspective. At Ubuntu we see ourselves as working very hard to bring innovation in the free software community to a wider audience than it would otherwise receive. And that’s a unique contribution that we can make. Everyone plays their part in the ecosystem, everyone makes the contribution that they are most interested in doing, the thing they will find personally most rewarding and satisfying. In the case of Ubuntu, we want to bring the brilliant work of the whole community to the world, predictably and smoothly. That in itself is, I think, an amazing contribution to the open source world – remember what it was like without that? When you had to wait an uncertain amount of time before you could have a fully-supported, properly maintained secure distro of your recent releases? I feel good about the contribution we make just on that level, so it hurts to be accused that “Canonical only makes a meager contribution”. If we didn’t do the work we do, lots of people wouldn’t actually have GNOME on their desktops, lots of bugs would not get filed, the system would not improve at the same rate. Just because we think it is important for us to focus more on that than, say, X or kernel development, is not a good basis for accusing Canonical of not contributing. In this world, we need both farmers and chefs.
We would never try to pretend that work done by someone else, which we are bringing to a wider audience, was done by us. And we have a good track record of celebrating, very publicly, the contributions of individuals who have done brilliant work. That’s the best way to say thank you and also the best way to encourage more innovation, more perspiration, more participation. I can point to plenty of examples where this sort of public praise, thanks and credit has been made.
In this specific case, I’ll find out why the team chose to drop the feature from the release announcement. I am absolutely sure it was not out of a desire to take credit for someone else’s work. It may have been that the team did not want to set a precedent for the final release in the actual announcement, as opposed to on the web site.
If you run Ubuntu, you’ll know that we devote a very high-profile menu item to the “About GNOME” dialog box. I’ve defended that on many occasions, because I think it’s vital that a distribution be a conduit for people back to the original projects that actually provide a home for the innovation that makes free software potent. Yes, Canonical does innovate, and does contribute upstream, and it is pretty revolting to read community leaders twisting facts to suggest otherwise. But we recognise that the vast majority of the amazingness in any distro release has come from the work of thousands of OTHER folks, whether that be GNOME, KDE, GNU, kernel, X, Debian or any of the hundreds of communities that help shape the free software platform today.
Comment by Mark Shuttleworth — June 29, 2008 @ 3:07 am
Eugenia! Just how many times and how many people will have to explain to you that you are missing the main point of this discussion. Kindly (re-)read the update on my blog and also my new blog entry on this subject. Thanks!
Comment by Zeeshan Ali — June 29, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
Mark,
Thank you for what you have written. It is a lot more in the spirit of our community than the comments I have seen in Zeeshan blog (and yes Zeeshan could have been more tactful himself). I think most of the absurd comments come from those who do not develop. I’ve seen this issue pop up between KDE and GNOME where the developers can sit down, joke together and buy each other beers while a lot of the vicious vitro comes from those who stop seeing the other guys as human and deserving of respect.
That is not to say arguments with strong words are never valid just that some dialogue has no place within a valid argument and serve just to cause strong reactions. Phrases like “stop being a cry baby” are just disrespectful and words I never want to see in any debate.
I would like to highlight however that this disrespect for developers has become a issue simmering under the surface. All distributions could do better to highlight upstream as the place where community development produces what we can distribute. It is this community that allows us to innovate and compete with more entrenched products. When people who commented were disrespectful to Karl, they were disrespectful of the whole upstream community. Perhaps upstream can help ease the burden of downstream by providing versioned about pages which list the prominent contributions for that version. This would allow all of us to easily provide direct links for feature lists and not be a burden to the downstream providers.
Comment by J5 — June 29, 2008 @ 8:16 pm
“t. Yes, Canonical does innovate, and does contribute upstream, and it is pretty revolting to read community leaders twisting facts to suggest otherwise”
Show it? Majority of Canonical employees seem to be working on a proprietary web service called launchpad. Where are your real major upstream contributions really?
Comment by neo — June 30, 2008 @ 2:37 am
@neo: Stop trolling.
Ever heard of upstart, the revolutionary new event based init system. It is the one that Fedora uses now. http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
Developed by Scott James Remnant, a canonical employee.
How about the Linux kernel bugs Ubuntu submits upstream?
http://tinyurl.com/5ymnoh
Or all of the patches here:
http://patches.ubuntu.com/
There have been enough patches from ubuntu to fedora’s system-config-printer tool, the ubuntu developer working on it has upstream commit access to it’s repository.
It isn’t like they are totally ripping off everyone and profiting. Quit pretending they are.
Sorry for using your blog as a place to feed the trolls, but someone might actually believe him. At least neo isn’t as poisionous as Ivan
Comment by Jeff Schroeder — June 30, 2008 @ 12:13 pm