On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Craig James <[email protected]>wrote:
> > 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 doubt very much whether there will be agreement. The best that is possible is a set of principles. Such as the BBB declarations for open access: http://www.digital-scholarship.org/oab/2statements.htm and an example: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. There have been YEARS of discussion as to what this means. Licenses do not generally help - there is confusion as to whether data associated with OA publications is free for use or not. Please accept as fact that this is a confused area. Stefan Harnad, Peter Suber, John Wilbanks, Peter Murray-Rust all have valid and significantl;y different views. > 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. > > I am all for clarifying things. I doubt very much whether it is as simple as simply choosing from 2 licences. But, for the record: CML HAS a licence (Artistic) specified in the pom.xml file associated with the project. That is a valid thing to do. It's not very convenient for some people. When I find time I'll do soimething. If someone wishes to help I'd be delighted. CML copyright is Henry Rzepa and Peter Murray-Rust. They wrote it and they've published it. You may not like the licence and you may not like the authorship but it's clear. In contrast there is no license for Daylight SMILES specification that I know of. There is no licence for ctfile.pdf (the online documentation of MDL files). There's no licence for most biological data specs - PDB, etc. files are covered by Community Norms. Crystaleye is specifically Opendata. That allows anyone almost complete freedom to use as they like. If there are rough edges in the material I and my collaborators produce then I will try to clean them up as I have time. There is no intention to make the work unaccessible or unusable or restrict membership. The BO is not a secret society that excludes people - it's a shared vision that will try to improve its approach in response to what happens in the chemical community and the wider world. The normal way to become part is to offer help of some sort. P. > 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 > -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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