Hi Ian, thanks for your answer. I do not completely agree
> My primary concern was to establish that the use of 'proprietary' in the > context of openEHR, particularly in the context of specifications / > archetypes but also in terms of governance, gives the impression (perhaps > unintended), that > > a) the specifications and archetypes are licensed using a closed-source > license. We know that this is not true, but it is not explicitly acknowledged by Gerard. His wording is vague. Now is Gerard not that important (or is he? I start to wonder), so we don't need to push for that. If he does not want to explicitly and clear state that the OpenEHR license is not proprietary, we have to deal with that. And for me that is easy, just ignore it. It just that I do not agree that his contribution from this respect yesterday was helpful. > > b) that ownership of the IP rests with a commercial organisation. That is no problem. Not-for-profit organizations can have proprietary licenses and commercial organizations can have non-proprietary licenses. It is easy to find examples. See RedHAT, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, they all have non-proprietary licenses. HL7 has been for years a specification-organization which was not free, which was proprietary of its members. Only since five years or so, it is a free non proprietary standard/specification organization. So regarding this second point, the statement which you found helpful has also not of much value. ------------------------- The only helpful statement to make was not made. And that would be that the OpenEHR specs are licensed by an Apache like license, which is for free use, (free as in free beer and as in free speech) for commercial and non-commercial use, for ever. There is no way the OpenEHR foundation will be able to close the specifications, if they do, every citizen can bring them to court. That would have been helpful, but that was not what Gerard said. So, I do not share your enthusiasm about Gerard's message, yesterday. There was nothing in it which was helpful from this respect. Thanks for the discussion on this. Bert _______________________________________________ openEHR-technical mailing list openEHR-technical@lists.openehr.org http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/listinfo/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org
