Best open source license for those wanting attribution?

Question

Yeah, I'm not too happy with the GPL having nothing preventing others from taking your work and claiming it as theirs.

I've been looking at the MIT and CPAL licenses. Any suggestions?

Oh and, I need the license to be compatible with MIT.

Answer 1

How about the Apache 2.0 license:

You must retain, in the Source form of any Derivative Works that You distribute, all copyright, patent, trademark, and attribution notices from the Source form of the Work, excluding those notices that do not pertain to any part of the Derivative Works; and

But I think you are worrying too much. Most users of FOSS code will happily retain attributions, license or no, and do you really have the financial resources to pursue those few who don't?

Answer 2

I recommend all software be licensed under the Poetic License:

(c) <year> <name>
This work ‘as-is’ we provide.
No warranty express or implied.
We’ve done our best,
to debug and test.
Liability for damages denied.

Permission is granted hereby,
to copy, share, and modify.
Use as is fit,
free or for profit.
These rights, on this notice, rely.

It is essentially the MIT license as a limerick. However, I'm not sure if this is exactly what you want. As a joke answer, I community wiki-ed it so people wouldn't think I was rep-whoring.

But I, personally, will be using the Poetic license on as much software as I can justify to myself.

Answer 3

The BSD license has an attribution clause in it:

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

I like the BSD license because it's short, straight forward, and easy to comprehend.

I would compare it with the Apache 2.0 License that Neil suggested and see which one better meets your needs.