This reminded me of google advertising about 'Chrome by google' on big billboards in London. My first thought was 'they are not giving credit to everyone else who did the work on chrome'. Maybe it should have been 'Chrome - an open source project by google'.
There is no advertising clause, but claiming that it is by google is still a big lie considering big parts were not written or designed by them. Including the main part - webkit/khtml, the html renderer.
Especially with open source projects, getting credit for your work may be the only thing you get. Giving credit is a gentle(wo)mans thing to do.
In academia this would be plagiarism... but in business, it seems to be business as usual. Business can get in trouble for giving credit, but academia gets in trouble for not giving credit.
Do you feel the same way about "Mac OS X by Apple", considering how much of that operating system (FreeBSD, Darwin, GNU, KHTML, llvm etc) started life in the open source community?
I'm as big an open source booster as anyone, but I can't say it upsets me in the slightest to see Google taking credit for Chrome in adverts. If anything, it makes me feel like the open source model has won - it's so widespread now it isn't even noteworthy.
Yeah, I do feel the same way about Apple. Apple claims credit a lot more than Google. Google is definitely way more free software friendly than Apple in my experience - like a whole different magnitude of more friendly :)
I see your point, but without giving proper credit, the developers of open source projects will not get credit outside of the project. They won't get the credit from the press or from The People.
Even in other open source projects it would be nice to give credit more evenly. As an example, many interviews or articles mention 'Guido the creator of python'. Whereas the reality is that thousands of people have contributed to python to make it what it is today.
It's hard to give credit even when you try your hardest to. Also, where do we draw the line? Do we start with crediting Persian, Egyptian, and Greek mathematicians and artists? Do we need to give a whole raft of references each time a trumpet is blown? Do we list individual contributors? Or just major contributors, or founders? Or perhaps not mentioning anyone at all - which many hackers do. An 'open source community project' is a nice compromise as it gives credit to everyone.
Perhaps 'Made by the people of the world, for the people of the world' would have been a better advertisement.
I think I'd argue that this _is_ analogous to academia (well at least to mathematics). Take Fermat's Last Theorem for example, it's commonly accepted that Andrew Wiles proved the Theorem. However, without the work and results of thousands of other mathematicians throughout history he almost certainly could not have done so. The credit to those people is given within the proof; "combining the results of X with Y's theorem..." not in an enormous list on the front page. Equally, the name Google goes on the advertisements but within source code and blogs and bug fixes part of the credit goes to the technology that Chrome is built on.
yeah, nice point. The standard way to give credit in academia is to list references throughout a work.
It's funny that on the proof it reads - 'By ANDREW WILES*'. So even there he was giving credit. It also mentions Fermat in the title, and within the first paragraph references a bunch of others.
Many open source projects use a section in their README, or a CREDITS file, or a credits link on their web pages... or a 'powered by X'. Many do all of these things.
Web pages often have a tiny link with 'made by X, designed by X, or powered by X'.
The business world often does not have this credit giving culture. Some times you might see 'coffee beans roasted by X' or other little notes on shop windows. Perhaps the employee of the month is another example.
I guess the main point of the original poster is that they would have liked to be given some credit for their work... and that they felt sad and a little depressed to see google taking their credit. They want people to know that they made that and not google - despite what the google marketing machine is telling people.
I think that if an entity does more than about 99% of the work it takes to bring something into being, it's fine for that entity to take entire credit for it.
Are you saying that the authors of libraries used should be counted in the credits, or are you saying that Google is going above and beyond the call of duty? If the latter, I applaud you.
But if you believe Google is obliged to credit those groups in any way beyond the letter of their licenses (e.g. share credit during advertising, as we're discussing), you've got it wrong. Do you also believe that Intel and AMD, Dell and Apple, all of the implementers of browsers that came before Chrome, and everyone down to Djikstra should be credited? Because, you know, they contributed in some way to Chrome's existence too. But that is not how crediting in software or any other discipline works.
There is no advertising clause, but claiming that it is by google is still a big lie considering big parts were not written or designed by them. Including the main part - webkit/khtml, the html renderer.
Especially with open source projects, getting credit for your work may be the only thing you get. Giving credit is a gentle(wo)mans thing to do.
In academia this would be plagiarism... but in business, it seems to be business as usual. Business can get in trouble for giving credit, but academia gets in trouble for not giving credit.