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Best Practices for Attribution

wiki.creativecommons.org

1–10 of 18 posts

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#3
post #2

I've always wondered how too do this for code that requires it.

Creative Commons recommends against licensing software with their licenses: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

They recommend a software-specific license instead, as those licenses handle code distribution requirements much more clearly.

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#4
post #2

I've always wondered how too do this for code that requires it.

Creative Commons recommends against licensing software with their licenses: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... They recommend a software-specific license instead, as those licenses handle code distribution requirements much more clearly.

I meant open source software licenses that requires attribution.

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#5
> This work, "90fied", is a derivative of "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol, used under CC BY. "90fied" is licensed under CC BY by [Your name here].

So how long does this get as we keep making derivatives? For an open source project, where there is a seperate license file, it is okay to have it go on forever, but I can understand why you don't want 100s of lines of license information inside your news story.

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#6
> One condition of all CC licenses is attribution.

There's probably a distinction that I'm not aware of but this is not true for CC0 (as stated also in the FAQ for CC0 on this same website).

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#8
Not terribly helpful. The issue I run into constantly with attribution is that the place I want to use a work does not have room for attribution. If you use a texture in a game for example, you can't just slap the authors name on it. If you put in the credits, nobody knows what texture it's referring too. If you make a list of filenames that links them to the author, it can get easily lost whenever somebody renames a file or reorganizes the directory structure. Some file format allow metadata, but not all and even that is sometimes lost when things get converted or updated. If you do derivative work it gets even more complicated: You make a screenshot of the game, who do you credit now? There might be hundreds of textures on display.

What I miss is a library for Creative Commons work where everything can be registered and content-id-hashed so it is easy to find, even without attribution on the work itself. A set of command line tools to verify that all your data files have proper licensing would be extremely helpful as well. It would also make a nice resource to just browse Creative Commons works instead of having them scattered all over the Web. And it could allow back-linking, so you could see all the places where a given work is used.

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#9
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creative Commons recommends against licensing software with their licenses: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm... They recommend a software-specific license instead, as those licenses handle code distribution requirements much more clearly.

I meant open source software licenses that requires attribution.

As an example, this is how Apple does it for iCloud:

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/acknowledgements-mmbb...

Re: Best Practices for Attribution

#10
post #2

I've always wondered how too do this for code that requires it.

Most project just use the Git history along with LICENSE.txt file in the top level directory. The Git history is the most accurate record of who did what on a project. Some project keep a list of authors at the top of the file, but that get outdated pretty quickly if you aren't really pedantic about it. It also fails to record exactly what part of the file they worked on.

If you use external libraries, leave them in their own directory with their own license files, or at the very least leave them in their own files. So it's clear that they aren't part of the project and covered under their own terms.

If you start copy&pasting code snippets, it gets complicated, as now you might be mixing licenses, which might not even be compatible with each other.

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