[darkengine]

To my understanding, the GPL does not require acknowledging the original author's contributions any more publicly than the Apache license (used by the project). The Apache license already requires preserving the copyright notice, which AWS did. I think the issue is the author wanted a more public acknowledgement of his work, which is a very fair ask. As far as I know, no license requires this (and, I believe such a license would be GPL-incompatible).

In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.

[lutorm]

My understanding is that GPL doesn't force the user to do _anything_ except license any derived work under GPL. It specifically doesn't put _any_ limits on what someone can do with that code precisely because doing so would limit your freedom (with the exception of the licensing issue which is required so as to not deprive _other_ people of the freedom to do what they want with the code.)

It specifically does not require you to pay homage to the original author. The point is to ensure that the code remains free, the original author has no say over what happens to it.

[foolmeonce]

That's true, but wanting acknowledgement in some specific way is pretty frivolous compared to wanting changes made to be available under the same license so the fork doesn't maintain an incompatibility/add-on advantage that can't be fixed.

Whether the GPL is good enough for that depends on whether end users are recipients of binaries and therefore would be entitled to the source under GPL.

[pvorb]

> On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.

I once discussed that with my employer and they agreed: it's almost never a good idea to fork a product in order to fix bugs, since you will have to continouiusly maintain the fork. If you get the fix upstream, you'll get the maintenance for free. So this often is not out of generosity, but rather in their own interests.

[toyg]

BSD and MIT licenses can be used with the advertising clause, and you can add anything you want. Similarly, you can add clauses to the GPL if you want.

Licenses are contracts. You can add to the contract that people who fork must do star-jumps every morning, if you feel like; but you have to state it upfront.

[semi-extrinsic]

AFAIK, the related question of whether an OSS license for a scientific software can require that people using the software cite the paper(s) describing the software, has been answered in the negative. You can ask nicely, but you cannot demand it under any of the existing OSS licenses.