Requiring Attribution: good idea?

[quinxorin]

I was wondering what people thought about requiring attribution for use of copyleft-licensed creations by FIRST teams for FIRST teams, intended to be used publicly. Is this considered rude? Specifically, I'm refering to my team's Lightning Robotics Match Results Retrieval System. It allows free use and modification, but requires attribution both in any redistributed copies and on the actual website pages that use it. Is it ok to require teams to say on their website that they're using technology that was developed by a different team (obviously it's legally ok, but is it socially ok)? Would it discourage teams from using it?

[Tomatosoup]

Honestly I don't think that it would discourage teams from using it. However, no matter what you do, people will always try to remove indication that the code came from somewhere else. I suggest just throwing a simple line of text at the bottom that says something like "This code developed by team 862 (Lightning Robotics)", and possibly putting that as alt code for an image somewhere if you're paranoid about it. If somebody really wants to make it look like they made it, there's nothing you can do about it. However, most people probably won't do anything to discredit the original creator.

So to sum that up, socially okay because everyone deserves credit for their work. Probably wouldn't discourage people from using it.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Check the terms of your license. If it requires attribution than you can require it. If not... well you can ask really nice.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by quinxorin

I was wondering what people thought about requiring attribution for use of copyleft-licensed creations by FIRST teams for FIRST teams, intended to be used publicly. Is this considered rude? Specifically, I'm refering to my team's Lightning Robotics Match Results Retrieval System. It allows free use and modification, but requires attribution both in any redistributed copies and on the actual website pages that use it. Is it ok to require teams to say on their website that they're using technology that was developed by a different team (obviously it's legally ok, but is it socially ok)? Would it discourage teams from using it?

Best not to be too picky about the method of attribution, but definitely alright to require attribution in some form.

If your licence says something about attribution, then the teams have to follow its instructions. You probably shouldn't impose any conditions over and above what's in the licence—this can lead to conflicts with unintended consequences. (Depending on the terms and how you phrase your requirements, you might invalidate the licence, or instead end up effectively dual-licencing it.)