Copyleft/share-alike non-attribution licenses?

Question

Is there any existing license can a person can use to distribute a document that allows reuse, derivative works, and free distribution, under the condition of it being licensed under the same or a similar license, but without requiring attribution to the original author? The common choice for share-alike seems to be CC-BY-SA, which does require attribution, but what if you want to be able to supply your name as author on the original work, but not impose mention of your name on all derivative works?

On that note, all the other CC licenses also seem to require attribution. Why is that? Does it somehow naturally follow from the other aspects of the license anyway?

I'm not sure how the GFDL would fare with this, but regardless there may be other practical issues with it like requiring printing the license text with each copy of the work.

Answer 1

Only a copyright holder (that's usually, but not necessarily, the author) can legally require a license being honoured. Thus without being able to prove that you are a rightsholder, you cannot enforce a license, and you have no ground to force anyone treat your work in a certain manner.

For copyright law being useful to you as copyright holder, you need to be able to prove that you are the rightful holder of the copyright. A copyright statement puts a nametag on the code - whether that's your real name or a pseudonymous one, does not matter too much as long as it is something you can prove somehow (e.g. also via a commit history which uses that pseudonymous name). If you now have code with no attribution attached whatsoever, it will be easy for anyone to 'claim' original ownership by attaching such a copyright note there - and this does not even need to be malice, but just someone who would like credits (and in the absence of your note, everyone will assume on first sight, that they are also the original creator).

This said, you as author decide how you want to see yourself credited. If you choose to not include any copyright notice anywhere, and just the license, you essentially have the information you ask for: code with a license, but no authorship directly named.