Hi! Discussing openEHR community, governance, licences etc is neither completely clinical or technical, thus we tried to keep parts of the discussion regarding CC-BY-(SA?) for openEHR-hosted archetypes on the wikipage http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+IP+License+Revision+ProposalUnfortunately the "oecom"-part of the wiki requires login*, so below those of you that don't want to create an account and log in will find an excerpt of the updates to the wikipage that have not already been posted to the lists. I'll post another update to the lists in a week if nobody else does it before me.
Best regards, Erik Sundvall erik.sundvall at liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/<http://www.imt.liu.se/%7Eerisu/> Tel: +46-13-286733 *) Login for read access is an unnecessary hurdle if you want wide and accessible community participation (and a bit hard to motivate for a really open project), so please open up read access for that part. Login for write permission (as it is now as for the rest of the wiki) is reasonable though. Below you find new additions to the wiki page: Summary of views by Thomas Beale (preferring CC-BY) I think that the key things we need to preserve with respect to archetypes, & templates are: - A - allowing an entity or individual to create a private archetype or template (it is all the same thing in ADL 1.5 anyway). This is clearly needed for - purposes of research (where some kind of local sharing / distribution was happening) - purposes of local use, e.g. hospital-authored and -used templates - commercialisation of equipment whose data may be described by templates - building of application and other software based on archetypes and templates that may or may not be published openly - B - preventing an entity or individual from patenting or otherwise 'occupying' part of the archetype / template space, i.e. preventing others from authoring (nearly) the same archetype or template by their own means. - this point is roughly equivalent to the problem of patented software, which is by and large not an accepted practice (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent). - C - encourage openness, cooperation and innovation - note that, as with other technology, the latter might be best encouraged in some circumstances by private competition rather than single open source efforts. CC-BY-SA would seem to prevent all cases of the point A above, where the artefact in question was *derived from* some openly published CC-BY-SA artefact. It might technically prevent B, but B isn't likely to be supportable even with CC-BY for the same reason as software patents not being widely accepted. C is not a function of the licence, it is a function of the technology, formalisms, governance mechanisms, and general health of the community. On the other hand, CC-BY will allow A, probably make no difference to B, and won't get in the way of C. The incompatibility of CC-BY-SA with A) above could lead to a competitive archetype-authoring effort. Summary of views by Andrew Patterson (preferring CC-BY) - Patenting should not even enter into our thought processes when it comes to looking at licenses for archetypes and templates. Even in a jurisdiction with broad definitions for patentable subject matter, there is no possible way an artifact such as an archetype could possibly be patentable. This is for a whole bunch of reasons, including novelty (archetypes are essentially documentation of common medical knowledge), but mainly the fact that it is neither a manufactured item, nor even an algorithmic process. So don't even worry about it. And even if you want to worry about it, the reality is that it doesn't matter what copyright license you put on an archetype - if someone wanted to try to patent something in this area (perhaps a generic implementation algorithm for archetypes) - they can do it without any reference to specific archetypes, hence the license is irrelevant. - You can't solve everything with the law - commercial entities should want to maintain compatibility with offically published archetypes because the benefits of sharing/interoperability/community involvement outweigh any possible benefits they might get by keeping them secret. - Custom changes to common licenses are evil. Either CC-BY-SA or CC-BY - not CC-BY-SA with changes. * Comments (3)* <http://www.openehr.org/wiki/users/editmyprofilepicture.action> 1. (old comment) 2. Jun 04 Erik Sundvall<http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/%7Eerik.sundvall>says: Sam, I need to understand your thinking/usecase better, can we have a dialogue h... Sam, I need to understand your thinking/usecase better, can we have a dialogue here in the comment field here on the wiki in order not to spam the lists? (Later we kan post a summary to the lists.) Feel free to ask questions back if you want me to clarify my reasoning. My basic question is why you think CC-BY-SA would serve openEHR better than CC-BY would. Your reasoning seems very vague to me, but what I sense is that it revolves mainly around making sure patient data is shareable and around community issues, so please speak up and clarify: - *Question 1:* Do you believe that it is easy/possible to split licensing requirements for different kind of derived works from the same origin (e.g. a derived screen form would not need to be SA but a specialiced archetype would need to be SA)? If so, please show how that would be done in a way that the community and companies easily trust and understand. I know a group of experienced lawyers could formulate a completely new licence type saying this, but that would not be a well recognised licence that people immedeately trust, you would lose the CC recognition. - *Question 2:* Do you understand the difference between these two: - 2a) Making sure nobody can distribute archetypes derived from openEHR-hosted archetypes under other licences than CC-BY-SA. - 2b) Making sure EHR owners understand that patient data (at least data that they at any point in the future may want to exchange with or transfer to other parties) is entered using archetypes with very open licences (such as CC-BY). In an earlier discussion (off-list I think) you believed that a licence would be the correct tool to guarantee that released archetypes would not be altered and later reissued under the same ID. You were shown (and accepted) that a technical solution with a mathematical checksum was the right tool, not the licence. I think you are again confusing what a licence could do and what is better done by other tools than licenses. In the case of 2b above, in addition to educating system owners, maybe there should be a technical import warning filter in openEHR based EHR systems that calls for the attention of system owners if clinical data that does not follow a CC-BY, CC-0 or similarly licenced archetype is imported. That would be a technical mean of detecting the stupidity earlier described in http://www.openehr.org/mailarchives/openehr-technical/msg04631.html. Anybody *could* already today use *any* licence (or even full copyright) when creating archetypes from scratch and they can start distributing them and using them for patient data. (Even though it would be stupid.) What licence openEHR chooses for the archetypes that they host will only affect archetypes derived from the ones hosted/issued by openEHR. The technical stupidity-detection would on the other hand detect license stupidity no matter what source it comes from. I believe you really want 2b but have confused that with 2a. - *Question 3:* Is it the case that you belive that using CC-BY-SA would somehow cause less fragmentation in the archetype authoring community than CC-BY would do? If so, can you see the parallell to using e.g. GPL (CC-BY-SA like) v.s. Apache style (CC-BY like) licences? Both styles have obviously worked to form strong communities and excellent software. Do you have any special reason why a CC-BY style community would not work for openEHR? Personally I believe that CC-BY-SA would cause unnecessary fragmentation of the community since many vendors (and national organisations dependent on vendors) would not want to risk be "infected" by SA/GPL-requirements, thus they would feel forced to very soon start an alternative archetype repository and development process using something like CC-BY instead. - *Question 4:* Do you think my fears (of community fragmentation in thre case of CC-BY-SA) are ungrounded and irrelevant? If so please motivate why closed source companies and their customers should feel absolutely comfortable using archetypes issued under CC-BY-SA or a new home-made openEHR licence with partial SA-requirements. Sam, the licencing question is important and I think picking CC-BY-SA for archetypes would be a really big mistake that would hurt openEHR community in general and in particular would drastically deteriorate the confidence in the board competence and the trust in the governance process of openEHR. I don't want that to happen, that's why I am arguing and spending time on this. I'd much rather keep developing the LiU openEHR based Educational EHR Environment than discussing licenses. 3. Jun 04 Thomas Beale <http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/%7Ethomas.beale>says: Erik, I think the analysis above is pretty good. We cannot legislate against all... Erik, I think the analysis above is pretty good. We cannot legislate against all bad behaviour with licences, only try to enable good behaviour. But achieving the community behaviour we want is actually done by other means, including good tooling (including content management tools, checksumming etc), good governance, and easy ways to participate. I also believe that CC-BY-SA will scare off some otherwise perfectly good commercial vendors, and will potentially create distrust. In my view it is better to have a looser licence, and enable the community dynamic in other ways, for example, by funding and improving openEHR.org/knowledge, so that it becomes a lead supplier of trustworthy international archetypes (and other similar sites may pop up in the future - why not?). With the possible addition of IHTSDO backing, and integration with ref set building in the future, most users will automatically go to this resource because of its quality, not because they are prevented from doing other things by over-strict licences. The only thing I really want to prevent is any private entity trying to lock up any part of the archetype design space by patents or other means, and I don't see how CC-BY-SA helps this at all. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20100607/88ccca09/attachment.html>
