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The advertising clause is inherently problematic to integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an important part of the community. For a distribution, having to acknowledge 1,000+ authors in all promotional materials is unrealistic. Worse, it won't be a problem initially, but only after most people had noticed this trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly discouraging everyone from using it.

A idea is to reword and relax this license: Similar to LGPL, you can skip the acknowledgement if it's used in an unmodified form. But it doesn't really solve the problem - if the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again. The next problem is that, it doesn't really cover all cases - in a previous incident involved Microsoft, Microsoft didn't even use a single line of the original code at all, it was just an inspiration from its framework, and the author was upset for not receiving any acknowledgement... Another idea is using AGPL's approach and targets cloud providers only, but still, it doesn't cover all the cases here.

I'm not sure whether using copyright to require acknowledgement is a good idea after all. In the academia, copyright and credit/attribution are two entirely independent process. The credit is not a legal matter, but simply a form of code of conduct and informal politeness. Perhaps promoting a code of conduct for acknowledgement in the industry regarding the use of FOSS could work better.



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