On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <[email protected]> wrote: > The intention of all the BO contributors of code and specs is to make them > available, and re-usable without inappropriate restrictions. There is no > intention to restrict fields of endeavour or people or organizations. > > Many of the BO components are 10 or more years old (CML was published in > 1999 and CDK and (Open)Babel and Jmol are older). The licences, code, etc > were written at that time and many have survived to this day not throughy > design but because it's a difficult maintenence problem. Most BO > contributors would probably put higher priority on fixing bugs , > refactoringand developing interfaces than managing the interoperability of > licences.
With is actually counterproductive when it comes to having these tools adopted in the community. Anyone who is interested in distributing these tools other than the main source, is very concerned about these licensing issues, such as Debian/Ubuntu. For the CDK I have neglected these issues in the past few years, but have been carefully looking at licensing issues earlier, just to get Debian to distribute the CDK. For example, this lead to a refactoring of the CDK to allow parsing of CML without depending on Xerces. > To summarize, therefore, Andrew and others have identified that we have a > licence maintenance problem. (I am not concerned here with the definition of > "Open" other than that we use things called OpenSource licenses because they > provide what we think we want.). > > If there is an agreed approach to licensing for BO software I will be > positive about adopting it but of course I don't have the details. I think > it needs to be done. But it will not be trivial and it will take > considerable time. If someone wishes to volunteer to lead this activity I > think it would be highly appreciated. See my comments on a Blue Obelisk ODOSOS Guidelines document elsewhere in this thread. > For myself I think it's useful to list the principles that I would like to > see in licensing BO material. That's how OpenSource and OpenAccess have > proceeded (not without intense discussion). Maybe we can then find licences > that are more-or-less usuable over the wide range of BO software. But I > suspect we shall have to have more than one approach. We can declare licenses compatible with guidelines. > For now, **are there any BO activities that are seriously held back by the > licences we have**. I appreciate there may be a lack of clarity but untilo > now no-one has mailed me or the BO about licence concerns and says it is > holding them back. For example OSCAR uses the Artistic licence - it's widely > used and incorporated in commercial products but no-one has raised the > problem. Right now, the CDK and Bioclipse is in violation of various licenses, by not adhering to license requirements, such as listing where source code of used libraries can be downloaded. This is being fixed. There is also that clause in the AL2.0 about making the not being allowed to expose the API, but your statements that that was not really looked at, and that in your opinion exposing the Jumbo API is fine, is enough clarification for now. Despite many of us not liking these kind of legal talk, they are really important to see our tools be used in industry, which simply have legal departments of people who really do care about these issues. Licensing is necessary evil to actually overcome the limitations of copyright law, and actually give people the rights we want them to have. If we do not do this properly, we are not giving out these rights, and therefore are *not* Open (or Free, or ODOSOS, or whatever we want to call it). In that sense, it is very much about not using CC0 when you want to have data in the public domain but making a vague (or no!) statement about rights... Egon -- Post-doc @ Uppsala University Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/ Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/ PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
