On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 07:02:09PM +0100, Ulf Möller wrote: > Thinh Nguyen of Creative Commons has posted detailed comments on the > ODbL on the co-ment website.
I think I’ve seen many of those arguments from the Science Commons project before, and they still gloss over the question of “what if the data provider wants share alike?”. They concentrate on whether the licence meets the requirements of the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data assuming it’s right for everyone. No doubt they believe it is, but that doesn’t mean it should be so. (Note, the background of the comment does cover this, and states in advance that rest of the comment is about the applicability of the Protocol and the ODbL.) They fail to note that if there are no rights in some jurisdiction, then the database is free anyway, and so are derivatives. If there are rights in some jurisdiction, and the database is made PD, then others in that jurisdiction may use those rights to avoid sharing derivative databases. Public domain dedication for *all* databases would be ideal, but you lose a good portion of the benefits when people are allowed to exercise restrictive rights over derivatives. Much of it is about complexity and cost, but that hasn’t been too much of a barrier to the adoption of reciprocal free software licences. Granted, it is more of an issue for databases and data because rights are not given in some jurisdictions, or are less well‐defined. The way to avoid complexity and cost would be to assume you have to follow the licence, if in doubt assume you have to reciprocate, and not to try and fight the licence and go through the expense of working out if you can get away with it not applying to you. In the university researcher example, if the researcher has the choice, he should make his work free. If it is down to university policy, then the university should allow the work to be free. If it doesn’t, the researcher can explain that he would have access to the data if the university relaxed its policy (it’s a shame that many universities seek to keep their research somewhat closed, especially when there is potentially money involved). However, I don’t believe the share‐alike necessarily comes in to action: The researcher should be allowed to use data for research, even substantial extractions from an ODbL licenced database. Only if the researcher provides a derived database do the terms start to get in his way. I’m unsure about having contractual obligations in the licence, and agree with some of what the CC say, but again, the way to avoid issues would be to meet the requirements of the licence. The other issues, such as enforcing the contract on downstream recipients, and the question of whether a “click‐wrap” agreement is necessary are being debated, and people are trying to come up with the answers, rather than just run away from the issues. It is a fact that share‐alike causes interoperability issues. Share‐alike in free software doesn’t get away from those, which is a reason why the list of licences at gnu.org[1] exists. People are willing to put up with these interoperability issues, giving up some freedom and sometimes used by all permissive licence supporters to brand share‐alike licenses as “non‐free”, for different freedoms: those that allow recipients of derivatives the same rights as they would get with the original. If some other database licence does not allow it to be distributed under the terms of the ODbL, then there is either a bug in the ODbL that can be rectified, or the terms of the other licence are too restrictive (or rather, don’t have the same freedoms). [1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html CC itself has already shown how we can deal with complex licences, and help users to understand them. They provide quite easily understandable summaries of their licences that indicate how they can be used. They concentrate on the core requirement, and don’t cover edge cases. Something like that, as well as assuming you should share the database if in doubt, can alleviate much of the complexity and avoid people being bitten through not keeping to requirements when they should have. Maybe I should add this to the discussion page for this comment… I probably will do if someone else doesn’t beat me to it. Simon -- A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.—John Gall
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