Add license terms to require crediting project when used

[nayafia]

Credit for this idea goes to @inconshreveable. Thinking about the long-term goal of solving funding, there are shorter-term goals that will help get us there. One big problem is a lack of data around stats/usage for dev tools, which makes it hard to demonstrate value.

Creating a license that requires payment is still controversial and hard to enforce, but what about starting with amending license terms to require disclosing if the project is used? Not much different from asking users to credit you in any other context.

Also hard to enforce, but big companies will probably do it, which are probably the most important ones to know about anyway.

[wolftune]

That's comparable to the BY "attribution" part of the Creative Commons suite. While the burden of excessively long attributions is a concern, there's legitimacy to this direction too.

[inconshreveable]

Ideally one could build a simple tool that parses requirements.txt, setup.py, Gemfile.lock, package.json, pom.xml, Go's vendor file, etc and spits out two files: a human readable one and a machine readable one. Those could then be hosted by the organization at well known locations: /foss.txt and /foss.json. One could also host files for them as part of the tooling; static file hosting is mostly free these days (github pages, for example).

The easier compliance is, the more likely companies will be to accept the license and comply with it.