Attribution ad absurdum

I drafted the post below a couple of years ago, but playing with some data derived from Ordnance Survey Open Data today and trying to mash it up with other open data sets with attribution requirements, reminded me that of what I'd written. I still think something is going to have to give with attribution and Open Data.

Caveat: I may have missed some references to things which were highly topical in April 2011, so bear this in mind when reading the main text.

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Attribution is an odd thing : the benefits are intangible, but people care a lot about it.

In the narrow sense attribution is about meeting copyright terms, but in a broader view it is about giving due credit for data, ideas or other contributions. Government bodies often insist on it. Some industries take it to extravagant lengths: compare a film from the thirties with one made now. Attribution is also at the heart of the system of citations in scholarly papers, and which blights the lives of many students, but is well nigh essential for researchers.

It's also important for OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is both a consumer and producer of data requiring attribution. It is also a platform for generation and testing of ideas, processes and software. In the latter case a credit or acknowledgement is the only benefit that innovators might get: one of the reasons for the naked frustration in Mikel Maron's blog post about Google's activities in Africa.