At 2:14pm -0400 Mon, 30 Apr 2012, Nigel H. Tzeng wrote:
You probably have already done this but I suggest seeing if the
ScienceCommons and NeuroCommons projects offers something to your liking.

Embarrassingly, I had not run across those. I'll get back once I've had a chance to digest them. Thank you for the pointer and those links.

IMHO you are better served to release under a permissive license and
build a community that encourages sharing than attempt to force
sharing. The neurocommons project is an excellent exemplar in my
opinion. I believe most of their code is BSD or something similar.

The problem is that at this point, we're not building a community, but rather adding to an already existing community. In the same breath, I'm painfully aware that as an academic (more specifically a graduate student), I have roughly $0 to litigate or otherwise enforce any license issue that may arise. And this is the rub for more than just my research group. We basically already "live with the fact that not everyone will follow it" (Bruce, in a sister sub-thread). In plainer language, the bottom line is that a law is only as good as the combination of "enforceability" and willingness of a people to follow it.

However, we believe there is more than one reason why folks in our sub-sub domain don't freely share their (academically oriented) code and data, including such "simple" problems as

 - Don't know how
 - Don't have a venue to do so
 - Don't believe anyone outside of their crew might be
   interested in recreating their results
 - Embarrassed by (perceived) quality of code
 - Afraid someone will implicate them with bad use of their software
 - Are not encouraged to do so by our journals.

We believe the reluctance to share code is *not* because of much (if any) malicious intent, and we believe having a GPL-esque license would be one more data point with which to make a compelling argument for openness in our community. Having an added incentive, like a "legally binding, if not directly enforceable" license, could help change the ecosystem. In this sense, a BSD-style license doesn't respond to what we want because it enables the status quo.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v482/n7386/abs/nature10836.html

Regarding your desire for an OSI approved license that meets your
criteria...I pretty sure it doesn't exist.

We're not tied to OSI approval; that statement was more of an attempt to elucidate that we were hoping for an OSI approved license if it existed, and to ask if the text of the OSI licenses was free for us to munge into our own license. In essence, what is the license for each OSI license?

Thanks,

Kevin
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