My bad, I ended up answering (affirmatively) the question: is this data open? not the question: is this an open software service?
If, as it appears, the software is not free/open then of course it is not an Open Software Service as defined by the OSSD (http://www.opendefinition.org/ossd/). More comments below. On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Mike Linksvayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 7:52 AM, Rufus Pollock <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> In my view http://dmoz.org/ does indeed meet the OSSD: > > What about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmoz#Software ??? > >> a) Data is available (via web and in bulk) >> b) Has a license [1] which allows for free use, reuse and >> redistribution though, as you point out, subject to a relatively >> 'arduous' attribution requirement. However I don't think the >> attribution requirement is such as to render it non-open (I think the >> test here would be: does this hinder use -- or reuse -- in any >> significant way and here, IMO, the clear answer is no). >> >> [1]: http://www.dmoz.org/license.html > > Clause 4, Errors and Changes, makes the data non-free > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmoz#License_and_requirements Yes, I saw that but given vagueness of 'commercially reasonable' efforts I figured this didn't buy much more than an exhortation. However, this very vagueness is a problem and one might well consider this an overly onerous condition. I'm therefore uncertain on the 'Open Data' requirement. > Dmoz was a very important early open content pioneer, but I'm afraid > it does not run on free software, does not make its non-free source > available, and its data license has problems. So it is non-OSSD > compliant all around. In this case it is definitely non-OSSD compliant. I also take your point about the data license having problems though as I'm not really clear what clause 4 requires I'm unsure whether it falls outside the definition of open data. One option would be to task them to clarify/remove -- do you think it is worth writing to them on that front (it seems a pretty useful RDF dump). Rufus _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
