Dear all, These days I have been thinking about the legal issues involving the use of existing archetypes. I have seen that openEHR archetypes available on the Clinical Knowledge Manager are all "Copyright (c) 200X openEHR Foundation". But, what does this exactly implies? I can download them freely, but can I use them in a commercial environment? Must I make public specialized archetypes or adaptations from them? Obviously, "I" is not me but anybody :-)
I have searched the openEHR page and wiki but I have not found anything about this topic, just a point in the copyright notice of the specifications linking to the non-existing page http://www.openehr.org/free_commercial_use.htm I think it would be good to start a discussion about licensing. I'm not talking about open source implementations, but about the archetype artifacts that anyone can develop. A first approach that can be made is the use of a Creative Common license. I think that one of them can fit the interests of the openEHR community. In my opinion, the main aspects that a license for archetypes must cover are: - To maintain the attribution to the original author (the openEHR Foundation or whoever) - To allow a commercial use of archetypes (like or not, health is a business) - To allow modifications and derivations of the archetype. - On behalf of the openEHR community, the new derived archetypes should be made public with the same conditions. This is arguable and could be eliminated. As I said, one of the Creative Commons licenses covers all this properties. It is the Attribution Share Alike license: "This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use." http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses Finally, this leads to a secondary point. Maybe, the "copyright" attribute of an archetype should be renamed to "license" to best fit the conditions of usage of archetypes. What's your opinion? -- David Moner Cano Grupo de Inform?tica Biom?dica - IBIME Instituto ITACA http://www.ibime.upv.es Universidad Polit?cnica de Valencia (UPV) Camino de Vera, s/n, Edificio G-8, Acceso B, 3? planta Valencia ? 46022 (Espa?a) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20090901/184ad8fa/attachment.html>
