Thanks Tom - it would be good to ensure that we are interpreting the license correctly. The SA clause begins:
You may Distribute or Publicly Perform an Adaptation only under the terms of... I interpret this to mean that there is no restriction on local or private use. It only applies to publishing. More in line... From: [email protected] [mailto:openehr-clinical-bounces at openehr.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Beale Sent: Thursday, 3 June 2010 12:45 AM To: openehr-clinical at openehr.org Subject: Re: [openEHR-announce] Message from the Board - openEHR Intellectual Property I think that the key things we need to preserve (with respect to archetypes, & templates) are: * A - allowing an entity or individual to create a private archetype or template (it is all the same thing in ADL 1.5 anyway). This is clearly needed for * purposes of private research * purposes of local use, e.g. hospital-authored and -used templates * commercialisation of equipment whose data may be described by templates * building of application and other software based on archetypes and templates that may or may not be published openly [Sam Heard] It is the publication that requires the CC-BY-SA license - none of the other activities. * B - preventing an entity or individual from patenting or otherwise 'occupying' part of the archetype / template space, i.e. preventing others from authoring (nearly) the same archetype or template by their own means. * this point is roughly equivalent to the problem of patented software, which is by and large not an accepted practice (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent). * C - encourage openness, cooperation and innovation * note that, as with other technology, the latter might be best encouraged in some circumstances by private competition rather than single open source efforts. [Sam Heard] I guess the nub of the issue is whether people want the licensing to support non-public development of archetypes. Personally I think this would not be a good outcome. The basis for sharing needs to be available to everyone. CC-BY-SA would seem to prevent all cases of the point A above, where the artefact in question was derived from some openly published artefact. [Sam Heard] I do not think it prohibits any of A. It might technically prevent B, but B isn't likely to be supportable even with CC-BY for the same reason as software patents not being widely accepted. [Sam Heard] If this is the case and would not complicate the world of interoperability I personally would be quite happy with CC-BY C is not a function of the licence, it is a function of the technology, formalisms, governance mechanisms, and general health of the community. [Sam Heard] I am not sure this is the case - there are some foundation aspects of openness that are difficult to build in retrospect (e.g. SNOMED-CT). The words 'derived from' are the magic words, and on the wiki page, I distinguished between two kinds of derivation, namely 'semantic' and 'generated'. The first, in archetype-land means archetypes and templates derived from previously existing archetypes and templates. There are 3 forms of this: specialisations, new versions and new revisions. Note that in ADL/AOM 1.5, a template is a kind of specialisation of a template or archetype. These semantic 'derivations' are equivalent to programmers creating new classes based on existing classes (via the inheritance relationship) or modifications of existing classes (e.g. bug fixes, enhancements, usually provided as logical 'patches'). To my knowledge, commercial-friendly pen source software licences (i.e. non-viral ones) allow A above for software, and have no effect on B or C. The other kind of 'derivation' is a hand- or machine-generation of some different kind of artefact such as a screen form, XML schema etc, from an archetype or template. Firstly, I don't know whether this kind of 'derivation' qualifies as 'derivation' in the sense of licences like CC-BY, since the new artefact is not of the same kind as the old, but if this is ambiguous, we certainly don't want to use CC-BY-SA, since we certainly do want to allow commercial use of such generated artefacts. [Sam Heard] I believe this is not the case and can be overtly stated if necessary. I also don't know whether the generated or hand-built output artefact could be patented, preventing another person creating the same thing by a different means (probably some aspects could, if sufficiently innovative), but a commercial company that uses patents might try to patent the generator/generating software or algorithm. [Sam Heard] A patent is unlikely. The concern is having to get copyright holders' permissions to derive works. I think it is more likely that they would just use normal legal means to prevent piracy, and sell it normally. From my point of view, even if we don't agree with such behaviour (I don't), it is not up to openEHR to try and prevent it, and the fact that CC-BY-SA would prevent perfectly reasonable commercial behaviour means it should not be used. [Sam Heard] It is certainly not my wish to prevent one iota of 'perfectly reasonable commercial activity' J. I also agree that modified open source licences are to be avoided at all costs, because once you change a licence, the accepted legal interpretation (often created by experts & knowledgeable amateurs over some years) goes out the window, and you don't really know what the meaning of the licence is. [Sam Heard] It is interesting that I find myself in a conversation on this matter with two of the strongest past proponents of open source with whom I have worked. I wonder if it is my role in this endeavour as a clinician that makes me more concerned about fragmentation and less focussed on interoperability. I find this discussion very helpful and I am sure we will get the best outcome if we follow through on this and ensure we have adequate protections for collective efforts. [Sam Heard] Cheers, Sam - thomas beale On 02/06/2010 11:15, Erik Sundvall wrote: Hi David and others! I have added a section for summaries of discussions to the bottom of the page at http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/openEHR+IP+License+Revision+Propos al The current version of the text is also included below: Summary of views by Erik Sundvall (preferring CC-BY) There has been mail discussions on (and off) the mailinglists regarding what license to use for content models (exemplified above by openEHR.org archetypes, templates, archetype-based queries).The concrete suggestion from the openEHR foundation board is tu use CC-BY-SA with some homegrown additions. In my view the argument right now boils down to: * The main difference between CC-BY and CC-BY-SA is that CC-BY-SA in addition to the CC-BY also adds the requirement that derived works that are distributed must be distributed under an open license. The board now for some strange reason wants to use CC-BY-SA with a loosely formulated addition that derived works "do not have to be openly distributed". I have not heard any reasonable motivation what this would gain compared to just using CC-BY from the beginning. In open source communities homegrown additions to (or modifications of) licenses are known to be potential problem sources. CC-BY and CC-BY-SA (without homegrown additions) have been scrutinized by lawyers and have been translated and developed to fit legislation in many countries, it would take a lot of work to do the same with a homegrown addition to CC-BY-SA - and if there is no well motivated gain, then why not just use CC-BY in the first place? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/mailman/private/openehr-clinical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20100603/08c7206a/attachment.html>
