It's probably required so that people know who to hold liable. Germany is sadly an extremely bureaucratic country :) But requiring attribution is a good thing anyhow I think, if someone ends up forking your project instead of contributing to it and then takes all your hard work for free and potentially even ends up making tons of money with it, the least they can do is give credit to you.

Although I'd happily take donations as a thank you as well, I don't work for a big software company with a huge salary so I can use every cent :) Really could use a faster computer one of these days, compiling Columns for Steem takes 80 seconds on here for the first compile and then 8 seconds for consecutive compiles, would be a second or less on a modern computer which makes the live programming a lot more fun, but I had to move back to an old Chromebook after my desktop computer stopped working recently (CPU fan broke off, only noticed it a week or two later when it kept overheating with random reboots and then finally stopped booting completely). Ah well, it works for now :)