Hi Erik
Plans seem to take some promising directions even though that whitepaper at... http://www.openehr.org:8888/openehr/321-OE/version/default/part/AttachmentDa ta/data/openEHR%20Foundation%20moving%20forward.pdf ...still needs some serious editing in order to better strengthen trust in openEHRs future. [Sam Heard] Getting the balance of top down governance and sponsorship and bottom up participation and 'ownership' is difficult and we have worked hard to get it right. This paper is seeking to set the scene and morph into one or more clear statements of intent. 1. First a procedural question: Was that whitepaper formally ratified by the new board, or by the old board, or is it's current state just a suggestion by Sam? [Sam Heard] The whitepaper was ratified by the participants in the planning process, the current Board (Profs. Kalra, Ingram and myself) and the new Transitional Board. I know for sure that some people in the acknowledgements... > Acknowledgements: Thank you to David Ingram, Dipak Kalra, Thomas Beale, > Martin van der Meer and Tony Shannon for assisting in the planning. ...would likely object to part of it's current content. [Sam Heard] It is obvious that there will be parts of the document that are not considered ideal by all the participants in its development. These have been thrashed out and we have presented the best first cut. 2. A second procedural question: What is the mandate period of the transitional board? When will the suggested new structure with an elected board start? That date seems to be missing in the mail and in the document, but having an end date is very likely important for building trust in any kind of stated interim governance system (ask the people in the middle east and northern Africa...). [Sam Heard] I for one am very happy to express a date for elections if organisations embrace these arrangements. Clearly if there is no interest in participating from industry or organisations then we would have to think again. I suspect we will then move to election of the Board by Members but it is our wish to provide a means of determining the governance for openEHR's key sponsors. The aim is to balance the Members with governance from the funders and sponsors. Some may prefer a democratic organisation top to bottom; we do not think this will achieve the best results. I am interested in the views of Members. 3. A document content change suggestion: Remove the CC-BY-SA part in the licencing discussion (page 5) since it makes the document authors and anybody ratifying it look incompetent. Saying that original things are CC-BY and that derivative models should be CC-BY-SA is just plain stupid. Then the originals are NOT CC-BY. It's just as silly as saying that a piece of open source code is licenced under Apache II licence but that any derivative code must be licenced under GPL... [Sam Heard] The point you are making I think refers to: --- Clinical Models Archetypes, Templates and Terminology subsets developed by the community Creative Commons for organisational and individual use. CC-BY-(SA) The Share Alike (SA) is specifically applied to derived archetypes and templates only. --- [Sam Heard] The text may not be sufficiently clear but the intent is. We are drawing attention to the fact that the intent is that the SA part of the license is only applied to derived archetypes and templates. That is, it is a CC-BY-SA license with specific exclusion of all derivations except archetypes and templates. This means that anyone creating a template from archetypes cannot claim that they own it and no one else can use or copy it. They can keep it secret. I apologise if this is not clear. The thoughts behind the third point in the "Principles of licencing" are understandable, but as stated over and over again, e.g. at... http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+IP+License+Revision+Propos al?focusedCommentId=13041696#comment-13041696 ...the SA part of CC-BY-SA won't help against copyright and patent abuse. Only fighting possible upcoming bad patents in particular and bad patent laws in general might save the openEHR community form patent abuse. [Sam Heard] If this is true then the SA part of the license has no value. If this is true then I have not heard this before. A more practical way is to enforce good licencing (e.g. CC-BY) upon import of archetypes and archetyped data in real systems and tools. That will at the same time protect against anybody sneaking in badly licenced stuff that is not derived from openEHR original archetypes (something that a CC-BY-SA scheme never will be able to protect against.) [Sam Heard] The intent is not to stop the use of any archetypes whatsoever, for any purpose. It is not policing. Rather , the intent is to ensure that people cannot stop anyone using an archetype or template without any recourse to action by others. There are many other interesting things to discuss and clarify in the white paper, but let's start here :-) Again, thanks for working towards a more understandable openEHR foundation. [Sam Heard] Thank you Eric Best regards, Erik Sundvall erik.sundvall at liu.se http://www.imt.liu.se/~erisu/ Tel: +46-13-286733 <tel:%2B46-13-286733> -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20110906/34910c4f/attachment.html>
