Jeff Good has written a blog post about how citation metadata was dealt with in various file conversions for the Lexicon Enhancement via the GOLD Ontology (LEGO) project. His post was written in response to my discussion and follow up (plus James McElvenny’s contribution) about citation practices of data aggregators like LEGO and PanLex.
Jeff’s bottom line is that he and others acted in good faith, didn’t try to pass off other people’s data as their own, and that “[t]echnology was the problem, not people”.
OK, but people create technology (something that software engineers in my experience seem to keep forgetting), and the decision here seems to be to prioritise expedience over intellectual property.