Wayne, agree with all you say below. What is your practical advice? Part of it seems to be: avoid home-made licenses. I agree in principle, and I think we are mostly ok on this in openEHR the main license for software is the Mozilla tri-license 'choice' (MPL/LGPL/GPL). If we make that the license for archetypes as well (following Tim Churches' arguments), then that covers most things of interest apart from the documents and schemas.
For the specification documents we need a copyright statement (well, everything needs one of those), and a license that says " don't mess with this document in the public space (but you can use it as you like internally)". Our current licenses seem reasonable for this, but they are home-spun. What official licenses are there for documents that are not to be modified except by the defined authors (doing anything else with official specifications is suicide)? The Gnu free documentation license doesn't do it, since it wants to treat documents like software (fair enough - it's designed for software manual-writers). Lastly, artifacts like official XML-schemas have to be treated in the same way in my view - we can't have the situation where someone is passing around a hacked openEHR XSD but calling it the original. I don't yet see the need for a license that differs from a fairly typical legal copyright statement (recognition of authors), non-modification (i.e. ensure reliability). In other words, the kind of thing you find in an OMG specification. - thomas beale Wayne Wilson wrote: > This is in regards OpenEHR licensing. It's amazing how much > discussion licensing can consume even without the legal profession > chiming in. > IT should probably come as no surprise then that many academic > institutions are seeing their legal staff increase faster than other > professional staff. > > On Feb 21, 2007, at 7:34 AM, [email protected] wrote: > > >> well, I think that's an overstatement. It's pretty easy to figure out >> whether you are an academic institution or not - or whether you are >> engaged in an academic activity. >> > > > In health care, in the united states, it's extremely difficult. The > organizational structures are complex. Most of our vendors have > separate licensing terms and teams for the health care enterprise and > the rest of the academic enterprise. This then leaves the Medical > School, where I work, in the middle of constant licensing disputes. > Some vendors let us use the academic licensing offered to the rest of > the University, other vendors insist we be treated as part of the > clinical care provider system and not subject to academic licensing. > I can find no clear pattern on how these vendors make these > decisions. So my point here is that my experience with commercial > software is that between the teams of lawyers working for the vendors > and the teams of lawyers working for the academic institution, no one > can make sense out of anyone's self crafted license, each one is > disputed and negotiated. And if this is not a turn off for people > without their own legal counsel or the money to fight in court, I > don't know what is. > > The whole license thing is a nightmare from my perspective and forces > me to make decisions on where I spend the institutions money. I will > spend it for support first and licensing fee's as a last resort. > > As for intellectual content, despite the notion that this is the only > way to make money in the information age, I disagree. I think one > makes money by providing service. I think the world of ideas belongs > firmly in the context of the creative commons. And that is where I > think things like database schema's, standards specifications and in > particular, archetype definitions belong. This is mostly a position > taken in academic institutions and not taken in the commercial world > nor in those parts of the academic institution charged with making > money out of intellectual property. > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > -- * Would you vote for a politician who has not responded to An Inconvenient Truth <http://www.climatecrisis.net/>? * */Thomas Beale/* CTO Ocean Informatics <http://www.OceanInformatics.biz>, Chair Architectural Review Board, /open/EHR Foundation <http://www.openEHR.org> Honorary Research Fellow, University College London <http://www.chime.ucl.ac.uk>
