We now note that that we do not waive our attribution requirements for Spritely Goblins, which are present in Apache v2 (and for that matter, CC BY, CC BY-SA, and most FOSS licenses) https://codeberg.org/spritely/goblins/pulls/998/files
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber
Attribution is the most important thing. -
Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber attribution is important for more than just courtesy: without attribution, you have no way of knowing if there are upstream changes including security fixes that should be ported downstream.
One of the cardinal sins (among several) of LLM-generated code in my view is that it's the opposite of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself). LLMs are happy to reinvent the wheel over and over again, and they're structurally unable to learn from any mistakes that they make.
As far as licenses, I've added a (not well legally reviewed or tested) don't-train-on-this clause, but also some extra disclaimers:
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber Yes, strong agree. I used to release things under various CC licenses, including code, because CC-BY covers the most important part well. It's foundational, practically (as a way of recognizing effort and tracing provenance) and morally, and what makes the LLMs giant plagiarism machines.
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@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.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber i care about attribution as a social function, but i don't care about enforcing attribution via licensing
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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.
And of course there's the good-manners part, which I prefer to be the important part because the above only matters if there's problems and I prefer there not to be problems.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
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.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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.
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@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.
@CyrikCroc @cwebber this!
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We now note that that we do not waive our attribution requirements for Spritely Goblins, which are present in Apache v2 (and for that matter, CC BY, CC BY-SA, and most FOSS licenses) https://codeberg.org/spritely/goblins/pulls/998/files
So if you train on our codebase, you have to retain attribution, which we consider the most important requirement to motivate development of technology in the commons.
If, somehow, you are using a statistical soup which has no way to preserve attribution, well, we don't permit or approve of dropping such a requirement, and actually, the licenses we use never have.
@cwebber attribution is vital for many of the reasons people pointed out already. But I can honestly say that every email with "hey, I have a problem with your stuff" is 100x better than 100 stars on a repo or whatever.
It simply wouldn't happen if nobody knew I wrote the code.
If nothing else, it underlines for me how this whole thing really is about people.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@cwebber I’ve always been surprised when I hear people say that given how many people clearly value it!
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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!
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
What did we call not attributing works in college? Plagiarism. Instant expulsion.
Attribute always, more attributions, higher the grade. Attributions make communities.
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
@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?
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Btw I have heard at least one prominent FOSS person (I'm choosing to not fill their notifications here by identifying them) that nobody cares about attribution requirements (and particularly not enforcing them). But to me, attribution is what I care about MORE than any other licensing requirements, more than copyleft "share-alike" style provisions, etc.
If you feel similarly, it would be good to hear on this thread. Perhaps even copying a similar notice into your project is a good idea.
(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.…
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(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.…
(2/2)…
I further am quite confident that we can rework #copyleft licenses to address most of the worst problems that #LLMGenAI represents for the future of #SoftwareFreedom.I've been working on itsince ≈2026-05. It's slow going, but I'm confident that #CopyleftNext will present a good solution.
Meanwhile, I recently asked for @cwebber's help toward this, but didn't receive a response. If you have time, pls respond to this:
https://fedi.copyleft.org/@bkuhn/117425328332275949 -
(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.…
Maybe ive been reading too much into some words; or maybe Ive misunderstood.
BUT some of your conversations and comments on LLMs to me and others have had a distinct "attribution is going to be fucked in a post-LLM world, the best we can hope for is to preserve copyleft" vibe to it.
I would be hard pressed to find an example in our own comment history; as my toots self destruct after a few months. BUT it's definitely come up.
Anyway; am I wrong in that sentiment? Do you think there is a way forward with some of these LLM concerns preserving attribution?
