Andrew Dalke wrote: > I can say on my part that I wanted clarification of why the > Blue Obelisk wiki page on Open Standards said that SMILES was > not an open standard while CML was an open standard. > > The continued description of SMILES as a closed standard has > been an irritation to me, because SMILES seems to be about as > far from a closed, proprietary standard as anything else which > exists in this field. > > I've also raised the issue that CML does not include a > copyright statement or have a definite distribution license > attached to it, which makes it hard for me to consider > it "open".
Ok, those are all excellent, concrete questions. And I agree 100% with your assessment of the openness of SMILES (I haven't looked at CML's license or lack thereof). BO itself, in spite of being dedicated to "the concepts of Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source," doesn't actually state in a meaningful way what those terms mean. English-language prose are nice, but legal documents have meaning. I just gave myself 5 minutes to see if I could find anything concreted on blueobelisk.org regarding licenses, and failed to find anything. There's one obscure link to opensource.org, and if you dig around there you can find over 60 "open source" licenses. If BO is about open chemistry standards, we could say that a lot more concisely by recommending specific licenses. One or two each for programs, documentation, and data. By doing that, we wouldn't have to argue about what "open" means. Craig ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Blueobelisk-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/blueobelisk-discuss
