Acknowledgments.txt

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% Supplement to the OSADL Open Source Policy Template
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% Copyright (c) 2019,2020 Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) eG
% Author: Carsten Emde
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How To: Acknowledgments


1 Background

A FOSS license may impose the obligation to forward or to provide an
acknowledgment using a text which is usually stated in the license. The obvious
intention of the original authors or the organization that owns the copyright of
the software to request such acknowledgment is to be credited for the time and
money of making the work available free of charge under an Open Source license.
However, it also is intended to transparently inform the recipient of the
software that the supplier may not be the author and may not merit the full
credit. For the latter, some licenses request that the acknowledgment is
provided at a conspicuous location and not in some hidden place where it can
easily be overlooked.


2 Examples

2.1 BSD-4-Clause-UC
A well-known example of an Open Source license that requires an acknowledgment
is the (original) BSD-4-Clause-UC license that states in section 3:

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must
display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed
by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.

Note that this acknowledgment contains a static string, i.e. it must always be
cited verbatim.

2.2 IPL-1.0
The (now outdated) IPL-1.0 license imposes a similar acknowledgment obligation
and requests that it must be placed in a conspicuous location:

Each Contributor must include the following in a conspicuous location in the
Program: Copyright (C) 1996, 1999 International Business Machines Corporation
and others. All Rights Reserved.

This acknowledgment also contains a static string and must always be cited
verbatim.

2.3 BSD-4-Clause
The general form of the BSD-4-Clause license may be used by right holders other
than the University of California, Berkeley and thus, each occurrence may name a
different entity (the term "organization" is used as a placeholder by the SPDX
Working Group):

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must
display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the organization.

All different texts of the various acknowledgments must be extracted
individually from every software package and provided along with advertising
material, if any. In some cases, the author or authors may have omitted to
replace the term "organization" by an appropriate name or ignored it
intentionally. In this case, the acknowledgment can be cited as is and needs
only to occur once should several files or software packages use the same
license.

3 Practical considerations

3.1 Required actions may differ
Only if i) source code delivery is chosen, ii) the acknowledgment obligation of
the license does not explicitly request a particularly enhanced visibility of it
and iii) the source code delivery contains the acknowledgment in the source code
files or in an accompanying obviously named file, no additional action is
required to fulfill the acknowledgment obligation. However, if the
acknowledgment must be placed at a well visible location or binary delivery is
chosen in which case the acknowledgment normally is stripped off during
compilation, the text of the acknowledgment must be carefully extracted and
provided separately in an appropriate manner. Copying and distributing software
without appropriately acknowledge the authors although it is requested by the
license may breach the license and, thus, constitute copyright infringement.

3.2 Examples of relevant license obligation as obtained from the OSADL License
Obligations Checklists
An Open Source license checklist may contain the section

USE CASE Source code delivery
  YOU MUST Credit Verbatim "Acknowledgment"
    ATTRIBUTE Highlighted

or the section

USE CASE Binary delivery
  YOU MUST Credit Verbatim "Acknowledgment"

while the latter may or may not require the acknowledgment to be placed at a
conspicuous location such as

    ATTRIBUTE Highlighted

In all above cases, the appropriate acknowledgment string must be obtained and
provided along with the product as specified in the license.

3.3 How to obtain the acknowledgment string
The recommended way to obtain the acknowledgment string is to identify and
extract it as explained in the Supplement -> "How To Scan