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 Mobile - Web - Media
 Friday, Aug 03, 2007 8:49:17 AM
If You Use Open Source, Leave the License and Credit
What percentage of Web developers and site owners are cool? Have you ever stopped to wonder? We're talking about a population that designs and builds the foundation of our digital existence. The people who provide the sites, the services, and the means for everyone to explore and experience this "World Wide Web."
Personally, I've judged it all based on my experiences, which have mostly been very positive. Fortunately, I got on this train back in 1996, back when the Web was battleship grey, and developers were hard to come by. Eleven years later, I'm now in a sea of developers and site owners, and yes, my experiences have remained very positive... until recently.
About two weeks ago, I rolled out a new version of my AddToBookmarks script, which is an easy to use solution for adding social bookmarking buttons to your pages or posts. I released the script with an open source license, and some credit/info in the files.
I wanted to see how many sites were using my script, so I do a search at Google that would locate my script: "Del.icio.us Digg Google Spurl Blink Furl Simpy Y! MyWeb," out of the first 25 results, 16 of these sites had stripped out the license and my credit/info from the script, and only 9 had left the license and credit.
Wow - Apparently, only 36% of developers and site owners are cool?!?
Actually, that's not true, as you can't conclude much from a 25 person study, although, these results are not very positive. It seems a lot of people either don't understand or don't care about open source licensing and giving people credit.
It's all very simple, if you use someone's work, and that work has a license and/or credit listed, you leave it. If you create a variation of the item, most likely the license and credit must stay with the variation.
Here are the results from my search:
Has License/Credit: 9
http://www.israelnewsradio.net/the-marty-roberts-show.html
http://www.watch4jobs.co.uk/blog/
http://www.brazil-travelnet.com/index.html
http://www.soccer-game-information.com/soccer-video.html
http://news.stepforth.com/blog/
http://www.onestopwebsupport.com/weblog/weblog.html
http://www.evolvingdoor.ca/zodiac/signsindex.htm
http://www.tophosts.com/articles/?002404.html
http://www.leadership-tools.com/advanced-site-search.html
Removed License/Credit: 16
http://forums.seochat.com/seo-scripts-10/coldfusion-optimization-3214.html
http://starrynightlights.com/blog/?m=200604
http://www.thegnuru.com/
http://ngeorgia.com/blueandgray/
http://www.europeanexperts.org/disp_zone.html?id_zone=33&lazone=VBA+(Office)
http://www.setfocus.com/aboutdotnet/default.aspx
http://rdoctor.com/symptoms_disease/content/blogsection/11/9/
http://www.roseindia.net/tutorialhelp/comment/6225
http://www.evictstop.com/bisf-mortgages.shtml
http://forums.devshed.com/business-news-124/google-to-bid-for-u-s-airwaves-if-condition-added-461312.html
http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/ASP.NET/Working-with-Parameters-with-Crystal-Reports-and-ASP-NET-2-0/
http://www.ddj.com/dept/architect/184406031
http://forums.devarticles.com/technology-news-57/effect-of-google-cookie-policy-unclear-ap-107583.html
http://www.scripts.com/remotely-hosted-scripts/web-traffic-scripts/free-google-pagerank-checker-webmaster-tools/
http://starrynightlights.com/blog/?p=19
http://www.vakaruge.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=173
license
open source
- ADD TO:
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 Blink
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 Del.icio.us
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 Digg
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 Furl
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 Google
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 Simpy
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 Spurl
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 Y! MyWeb
comments
1
Wow, interesting read... Doing a lot of web development myself, I always keep license texts and such (so I guess I would be one of the cool guys). But I would never figure the number would be that low. Even if they have modified the script, they should have kept the license and perhaps added a note about the script being based on your code.
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