Hi Ian! Nice to have more than one single board member to actually discuss with on the lists, this is already a great openEHR improvement!
On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 15:07, Ian McNicoll <Ian.McNicoll at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > The issue of CC-BY vs. CC-BY-SA has, of course, been extensively > discussed and although the previous board took a decision to adopt SA, > this is very much up for further discussion. Good. Don't wait too long, there are several more interesting and fun things to discuss and work with once the licensing stupidity is solved. >?Like many others, I did > not get particularly involved in these discussions as it felt to me > (perhaps incorrectly) to be a somewhat arcane and legalistic debate > over a pretty fine point. How can this be explained to clinicians of the board if what is already on the wiki... http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+IP+License+Revision+Proposal ...is not enough? Just read through that page and follow the links to the messages in the cited mail debate dating years back, then ask again if any points are still unclear. Analogies can be misleading, but I'll try: What danger is "a pretty fine point" of a malign cancer cell cluster in a human body, why so much fuzz when you detect that? Whenever I talk to software people they seem to immediately understand the issue and importance of not having licence-contagious (GPL/SA-like) code getting into the wrong parts of closed source systems (if you want to allow closed source business models in your ecosystem). Software people also understand that you simply can't claim to publish something as CC-BY at the same time as you say that some derivative works based on it should be CC-BY-SA, that's just incredibly misguided and any governance body letting that slip through is not to be completely trusted regarding license competence until further educated... If you don't have people on the board understanding software industry basics, then the board is missing some vital competence and you should make sure to either get that competence into the board or take the advice of people like Tom Beale in these questions. Just as much as you'd probably consider it wise to consult a clinician rather than a software specialist regarding medical issues. The "fine point" of licensing is fundamental for most companies before deciding if they want to commit commercial resources into any software-related project. I have heard serious arguments in more than one country where companies/organisations are not wanting to use openEHR archetypes partly because of the SA licencing issue. They may have adopted the technical framework (RM etc) but are using their own set of archetypes, and as long as they don't exchange data outside their own systems then there is no perceived interoperability problem... *sigh* > What might be helpful to me and others would be some clear practical > examples of the kind of scenario for which CC-BY-SA is thought to be > required (rightly or wrongly). Read that wikipage and the mail links again, there are several examples in those texts where CC-BY-SA would likely reduce trust in openEHR as a viable business option. One major short term risk I see currently is that the foundation will continue to be slow in response to licensing concerns and that as a result competitors to the openEHR-hosted CKM will pop up using better licenses (like pure CC-BY) for their non-openEHR-derived archetypes and that the archetyping community gets fragmented and semantic interoperability thus is reduced. Another short term risk is that fewer commercial entities might be interested in openEHR if there is a perceived lack of understanding of software industry needs in the board. But I think you find most of these arguments already on that wikipage and in it's linked mail discussion. http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+IP+License+Revision+Proposal Do read it. And the links. Please. // Erik
