hi > we should certainly examine the discussions you have had in FHIR-land.
The discussions were all private threads, but I can give you a summary run down. We start with our plain english license: * FHIR is ? and ? HL7. The right to maintain FHIR remains vested in HL7 * You can redistribute FHIR * You can create derivative specifications or implementation-related products and services * Derivative Specifications cannot redefine what conformance to FHIR means * You can't claim that HL7 or any of its members endorses your derived [thing] because it uses content from this specification * Neither HL7 nor any of the contributors to this specification accept any liability for your use of FHIR Our intent here is a license for a standard: lots of commercial companies are going to be forced to use it (eventually), and lots of open source applications too. What can we do to make that easy? Well, we let anyone do anything, as long as they can't grab control of the actual spec. For FHIR, at least, that's vested in HL7, so when we think about grabbing control, we think in terms of "from HL7". There's another set of considerations there too: with a lot of existing specifications, implementation guides - which are very derivative works - are in a grey zone. In fact, my opinion is the bulk of Australian HL7 derived standards are not ok against the HL7 license (and lots of other IGs too...), but HL7 affiliates don't push the issue because we want adoption. Well, they don't usually push the issue - and if they do, it's extremely self-destructive. But we wanted to be explicit and clear: whatever you need to do in an implementation guide, go do it with no worry about 'surprises' later (they tend to be expensive$$$$). The outcome is what matters: you use our common standard, and it's good for you, us, the providers and the consumers. Oh, and, btw we also need to assure implementers that HL7 will not be a capricious or undeserving steward of the work, so we don't try and come up with some exclusivity with the license, whereby some derivatives are ok, and some aren't. Whatever people want, that's fine. We'll just be the best steward we can be. So we started with that notional agreement. Which, I must say, seems to me to apply to openEHR. I know that there's some in the community who think that there should be some limits to commercial use for one reason or another, or that if companies 'benefit' from the community, they should be obliged to put back in (a Stallman kind of thing, but I think that's self-limiting. we all have to earn a buck). It seems to me that this kind of thinking doesn't apply to openEHR - the goals are to help exchange health data, and unless there's some collective fantasy that people are going to start providing healthcare for free, it's always going to have a commercial element. So we knew what we wanted. Initially, we considered the available CC licenses, and others, and rejected them because they didn't have anything in them about redefining conformance to the publication. As a work around we adapted a license from the OMG, but that's not really open, and it was generating problems for us because - the fine print didn't quite say what we said in plain English - because it wasn't a standard license, people needed to review it / pay for lawyers to review it - using a non-standard license meant that some purists claimed we weren't really open I wanted to fix that, but the process of getting lawyer time and dealing with the organizational approval process just seemed like too big a mountain to climb So Paul Biondich from OpenMRS got in contact with me, and offered to pay for lawyer time to resolve this (I really appreciated that). His lawyer (Larry Rosen) and I went back and forth on the plain english license making sure that he understood exactly what we wanted. For instance, our conformance thing wasn't a play for total control of the eco-system (unlike some other companies), just a play to retain control over the specification. Once he was clear what we wanted, he pointed us at CC-0 - it does what we want (btw, Larry would like us to do more about patents - as would I - but that really is a mountain too big to climb). When I raised the issue of conformance not being covered by the license, he pointed out that this is a not a *copy*ing issue, but a *control of meaning*, e.g. trademark issue. So we agreed that we would (a) adopt CC-0 and (b) beef up the trademark protection. HL7's own lawyer wasn't really comfortable with allowing derivative works, but that was actually an issue with our intent. We need to allow derivative works because there's too many things that should be allowed that a reasonably described as derivative works. So I proposed this to HL7, and Chuck Jaffe (HL7 CEO) took on the herculean task of steering that change through the organization (it should have been straight forward because we weren't changing the intent, but these things never are straight forward). We beefed up the procedural stuff around trademark protection further during that process, but not much else changed; it was mainly an educative process. So that's the background. The key question is to agree what you want to achieve; the exact license is a vehicle, not a goal. My personal opinion is that openEHR should do what FHIR has done, and for the same reasons: you should want everyone to use the work without hesitation, but you don't want someone to try and grab control from the community. So, I think openEHR should find a partner in the US to hold the openEHR trademark - something that big corporates couldn't ignore. IHTSDO, HL7, AMIA, something. And then adopt CC-0. I really like where we are now because when the open source people come my way, I can tell them that we're really really unencumbered in a way that they haven't go the guts to do. They still insist on attribution etc. So there! Grahame On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 10:19 PM, Thomas Beale <thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com> wrote: > > Grahame, > > we should certainly examine the discussions you have had in FHIR-land. Is > there a link to any discussion, debate on this (i.e. we know what the result > it, but what was the thinking along the way?) > > - thomas > > On 02/10/2014 09:11, Grahame Grieve wrote: >> >> This is why we choose CC-0 for FHIR. End of story, there are no debates. >> >> Sure, people can go and try and make money off FHIR. All power to >> them. But times have changed - if they're intending to compete, they >> won't stay ahead of the community nowadays. So anyone worth working >> with will share the common stuff, and focus on making money using and >> leveraging our IP. Which is what we want to happen. >> >> Other people have raised the concern that people will be able predate >> the work and take it away from us. Not so. They have confused >> trademark, patents, and copyright. We yielded copyright. Trademark we >> explicitly did not, and patents.... that's a complicated story of it's >> own. But public prior art is the best defense against patents, and >> FHIR is busy creating public prior art. Of course, openEHR has been >> doing so for a lot longer >> >> Grahame >> > > > _______________________________________________ > openEHR-technical mailing list > openEHR-technical at lists.openehr.org > http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org -- ----- http://www.healthintersections.com.au / grahame at healthintersections.com.au / +61 411 867 065
