I don't mean for this to come off rude, but how can you be so cold? How can you lack so much empathy? At some point you have to learn that things matter to people.
Volunteer projects rely on an unspoken contract that symbolic recognition, awarded fairly, is a real motivation. And if a project wants to succeed, it needs to take that seriously.
Does the project owe its contributors anything? Legally, no. But if it wants to survive and keep contributors, then it had better damn well work hard to recognize them. The project isn't owed anything. The project should consider its free, voluntary member contributions a privilege.
> Does the project owe its contributors anything? Legally, no.
Uh, what? Legally, yes.
Why are so many people (see sibling below: "Perhaps legally, in this case, they're owed nothing") just rolling with the suggestion that this is a grey moral issue and not a legal one? It's more than a moral issue. This is Creative Commons content. Mozilla doesn't acquire ownership of project contributors' work...
Once again, we have another Mozilla-related thread where we find two "sides" of an issue, with both offering takes that reveal that neither has any idea what they're talking about. What is it about Mozilla that attracts this sort of thing?
I think it's completely clear from context that the references are to the project as a human organization, not its content. Obviously recognition is given by organizers... not by Creative Commons-licensed content, ha! Unless text has become sentient now. :)
But I don't know why you're then choosing to baselessly insult people who discuss things about Mozilla...? Call me crazy, but I don't think that's a helpful or constructive attitude here...
> baselessly insult people who discuss things about Mozilla...?
It's neither baseless nor is it an attitude that is not "helpful"—I laid out exactly what the basis for the comment is, which comes almost directly from Frank Hecker's post a couple months ago after the most recent layoffs:
> Incidentally, doing a Twitter search on ”Mozilla” gives a good feel for public perception of Mozilla among technologists, but unfortunately most of the people commenting have no real idea what they’re talking about.
On the other hand posting false or simply misleading information, whether intentional or unintentional, is unhelpful. And if it's unintentional, there are a few different ways to respond when someone points it out. One way is to feel insulted and post an emotional response. Another is something like, "Oops, my mistake. I wasn't really thinking about that when I wrote what I did, but on second thought: good point!"
I don't really know what your first two sentences about human organizations and context are supposed to mean. Mozilla does have a legal obligation to abide by the license terms—in contrast to what you wrote—and that's pretty much that.
You're right, it did start that way. And then the matter of legal responsibility was brought up; one person even posed the question, "Does the project owe its contributors anything?", and gave a direct and unequivocal response: "Legally, no." (Side note: that person was you.) And to say that is to say something that is simply not true—as untrue as any statement now about my being confused about whether legal responsibility was being discussed.
You can't rewrite history. (And we shouldn't have to replay all this. It's still all there to see...)
I don't know why you're so willfully misreading this.
The project doesn't owe the contributors anything legally in terms of recognition (or payment, etc.) which was the subject being discussed. That's quite obvious from the context.
Nobody ever brought up legal ownership of content at all -- that's 100% your misinterpretation.
It's kind of amazing how you misunderstand comments and then go on to insult others for supposedly misunderstanding comments... and then proceed to then do it all over a second time! Amusingly ironic. Better luck in the future, my friend... ;)
Sorry, that's not going to work. The comment you responded to outright said these things:
- "MDN isn't yours."
- "Do they owe you something?'
- "You're not owed anything."
... and your response? "Legally, no"—but of course the problem with that response, again, is that legally, yes; they do owe something.
So try rewriting the context and all the rhetorical gerrymandering you want, but it doesn't change that the fact that (a) there was a discussion in terms of legal responsibilities and (b) in that discussion about those responsibilities, your comments were incorrect. Being wrong because of a slip-up is fine—and it wasn't even wholly your slip-up; you were yes-anding someone else's comment. But this scrambling now to double down after it's pointed out and the subsequent projection—particularly in your last paragraph here—is more than a little annoying to encounter.
> The project doesn't owe the contributors anything legally in terms of recognition
... except they do, for the reasons already stated. Maybe there's some attempt at sleight of hand in your choice of the word "recognition" here (i.e., as distinct from "attribution", but even then, it's not clear whether any argument there, if there is one, would even hold up)—but it's not really important. Because "attribution" is the word that was used, attribution is what the BY part of CC-BY-SA stands for, and attribution is what's required by that license—yes, legally.
It's pretty bewildering that you think you have an argument here.
> Why are so many people (see sibling below: "Perhaps legally, in this case, they're owed nothing") just rolling with the suggestion that this is a grey moral issue and not a legal one?
I mean, I dedicated an entire paragraph above that comment to pointing out moral possible legal problems, and used "perhaps" as an explicit indicator of uncertainty and doubt. The moral issue isn't particularly grey. The legal one...
There are various attributions for "Mozilla Contributors". Does that technically suffice under either the license terms or in juristictions which recognize authors rights? (What juristiction(s) apply - hosting provider, Mozilla's headquarters, or perhaps the original authors?) Do they perhaps more explicitly attribute the original authors elsewhere? Certainly stripping names from an explicit copyright header would almost certainly be a license violation, but does flattening VCS history in the manner also count as one? Did CC licensing terms apply at the time of previous CMS conversions? Were there perhaps contributor agreements and/or clickwrap licensing agreements previously which would've made this legal? Are there more buried attributions which might technically meet the burden of attribution while still being done poorly enough to feel slighted? Perhaps in some juristictions but not in others?
Can you answer all that with enough certainty as to assert that you "have any idea what you're talking about"?
> What is it about Mozilla that attracts this sort of thing?
Both sides offering takes that reveal that neither has any idea what they're talking about is far from unique to threads involving Mozilla. I dare say it's not even unique to the internet.
> The moral issue isn't particularly grey. The legal one...
Also not grey—same as before.
> Can you answer all that with enough certainty as to assert that you "have any idea what you're talking about"?
Hey there. I'm a former Mozillian. I was a heavy contributor to Devmo in its early days (2006–2008). A bunch of that content is mine. It's not Mozilla's, and I know on what terms I made it available. So to answer your question quoted above (a) yes, in fact, I do know what I'm talking about, and (b) I don't have to be able to give an answer for every slot in your contrived matrix; it suffices if I'm able to say, "hey, you can't do that with the pieces that belong to me". And that's something that I can say—with certainty.
Because that’s not how the world works. This is evident by living in it. Otherwise, this wouldn’t have happened.
What’s happens in the real world is that you abide by contractual agreements and if a party breaks the agreement, you sue them for breach of contract. This also requires that you can sue them for breach of contract. Otherwise, you can kick dirt.
Volunteer projects rely on an unspoken contract that symbolic recognition, awarded fairly, is a real motivation. And if a project wants to succeed, it needs to take that seriously.
Does the project owe its contributors anything? Legally, no. But if it wants to survive and keep contributors, then it had better damn well work hard to recognize them. The project isn't owed anything. The project should consider its free, voluntary member contributions a privilege.
Understand now?