Orthodoxy and orthopraxy in open source

I was reading an account of the Mormon pioneers this morning, and specifically the Martin and Willie Handcart companies. The stories are often repeated here in Utah, but most others haven't heard of them.

In a nutshell, they were pioneers making their way to Utah, and started too late to avoid the winter storms. The result was terrible. As Martha Robinson Blackham related in her journal about the crossing of the Platte River:

The waist-deep water "put them into shock. . . . Upon reaching the other side a tremendous storm of snow, hail, and fierce winds hit the company. . . . That night 13 pioneers died from exposure. . . . Deaths came frequently [in the next few days] and the dead were found . . . holding hands, or sitting by the fire, or while eating crusts of bread or when singing hymns.

In Salt Lake City, Brigham Young heard about their plight and quickly called for volunteers to make the several hundred-mile trek to find the handcart companies, declaring:

I will tell you all that your faith, religion, and profession of religion, will never save one soul of you in heaven, unless you carry out just such principles as I am now teaching you. Go and bring in those people now on the plains, and attend strictly to those things which we call temporal, or temporal duties, otherwise your faith will be in vain; the preaching you have heard will be in vain to you,...unless you attend to the things we tell you.

Such is my feeling, as well, in most things, including open source. It's not what you say or believe, but what you do.

Orthopraxy, not orthodoxy. Correct practice, not correct doctrine/thinking.

Without straining the analogy too far (and certainly the stakes are far lower), there's currently a debate raging about attribution licenses and open source. Zack Urlocker has nicely summarized it. I've also written on the topic before.

Some in the open source community, as found on the license-discuss list, believe that open source burdens distribution, and so violates the Open Source Definition. I understand this point, but mostly reject it. I don't believe that attribution burdens distribution any more than the GPL does, and arguably does less so.

(In fact, I'm not a big fan of attribution precisely because it doesn't require enough. I'd prefer a stronger "freedom burden" such as the GPL requires. In other words, the MPL + attribution is far too easy on downstream users of the code. That's why I've long been a GPL advocate.)

Regardless of all this, and back to my original line of reasoning, one thing that bothers me in this debate is all the talk and theorizing I hear from some in the open source community who complain about attribution. Most of them contribute little or no significant code to any particular project, yet they have crowned themselves the arbiters of what open source means. On the other hand, you have corporations and projects that are churning out prodigious amounts of code - code that can be freely used by anyone - and asking for almost nothing in return. Yet these are being branded "pseudo-open source."

By whose definition?

Yes, there is a concern that "open source" can come to be meaningless if we don't hold the term to a set of standards. But my personal feeling is that the "wisdom of crowds" works just fine in separating the wheat from the chaff. And I'm betting that this wisdom would side with attribution right now, because attribution is responsible for a huge amount of exceptional code being channeled into the open source code pool.

These companies and code writers are doing, not just saying. Praxy, not merely doxy.

Which would you rather have?