Thomas Beale wrote:
> 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.
Agreed, although you might want to consider licensing archetype
definitions only under "copyleft" licenses, which include the GPL and
the MPL, but not the LGPL, for the reasons I mentioned previously.
Or you could consider licensing archetype definitions under the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, the plain-English text of
which (there is a legalese version as well, as well as versions in many
other languages) says:
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
You are free:
* to Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to Remix -- to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified
by the author or licensor.
* Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you
may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this
one.
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the
license terms of this work.
* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from
the copyright holder.
> 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.
How about the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 license:
You are free:
* to Share -- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
Under the following conditions:
* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified
by the author or licensor.
* No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon
this work.
* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the
license terms of this work.
* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from
the copyright holder.
Note that if you use the above licenses you need to clearly state in
your documents exactly how you want the works to be cited or attributed,
as that is not spelled out in the text of the license (nor should it be).
See http://creativecommons.org/license/ for the full range of Creative
Commons licenses. However, I very strongly urge you (and Brendan Scott,
an open source licensing legal expert and lawyer convinced me of this)
*not* to use any of thee Creative Commons licenses for openEHR software
(the current triple MPL/LGPL/GPL licenses are perfect for the software),
and absolutely *not* to use any of the Creative Commons licenses which
discriminate on the basis of field of endeavour (like their
"non-commercial" licenses) or on geography/country (like their
"Developing Nations" license), no matter how superficially attractive
these licenses may seem. The reason, as I mentioned and Wayne expanded
upon, is the legal quagmire which such discriminatory applicability
clauses create, even if the discrimination is in the "affirmative
action" sense, as in their "Developing Nations" license. It is far more
hassle than it is worth to anyone, and just turns people off. But the
non-discriminatory Creative Commons licenses are fine, and are very
popular eg the open access publishers BioMed Central and Public Library
of Science both use them - see http://www.biomedcentral.com and
http://www.plos.org
Tim C
>
> - 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
