Hello friends,
I would like to start a small discussion about software licenses. Exact Free Software licenses. I have already been asked several times if I would provide the source code of my software. As a former Linux developer, I am generally a friend of Stallman's open source thoughts. Unfortunately, I have already experienced several times that software that I wrote (and that's a lot of work) just copied and published under another name again. That is in the context of the GPL if one releases the code no problem. But I think that the developer of the software has earned a little recognition for his work. I provide good software that is free in use and remains. But I think that one should mention the developer who made the effort even with a further development of third. This could look like this: This software is based on ECalc by Dierk-Bent Piening. I have not found a license that does that. I think it's a pity that the work of many developers volunteering a lot of work for you are not recognized. I'm interested in your opinion? I'm wondering if I should write a license demanding this one sentence. What do you think about Open Source and the GPL? Can you understand my view?

I certainly appreciate anything that any programmer contributes that is useful to me, and fairly often I have made a donation to that person or to a bounty for further development to be advanced.

It seems, therefore, only fair that work that has been built on by someone else's effort should be recognised, so for me this is a "no brainer" - of course it should, and that obviously applies to your work here as well.

No doubt Papiosaur will notice your Ecalc work, along with any other contributions you make, and may well add you either right away, or in due course, to active developers, for which he has been known to collect a pot of money to divide amongst those involved, basically on our community's behalf, at some point in the year.

Does that seem reasonable?

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Not really uncommon, I've come along licenses in the vain of "do what you want, just add my name" at least twice.

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No offence intended, but that really just means you have not looked very hard.

For instance, the most popular open source license on Github, which is afterall the world's largest host of source code, is the MIT license (not GPL).

The MIT license includes this text:

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

Also, GPL v3 does specifically allow software authors to require copyright information to be retained. This is covered in section 7 and its subsection b:

"Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms: [...] b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it"

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You are not the first person to have this view and plenty of developers have thought about these issues before you ever did. There are many licenses that specifically cover copyright attribution. So, there is really no practical need for anybody to write a custom license to address this specific issue.

Asiegel. That is not what i mean. in my view the notice about the developer should be in the copyright notice in the software itself.

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That is what "Appropriate Legal Notices displayed by works containing it" (GPL v3, see above) means...