Hi everyone, In light of the recent re-licensing of FHIR<http://www.healthintersections.com.au/?p=2248> using the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain Dedication as well as the discussion about licensing at the 2014 openEHR Roadmap Meeting<http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/September+2014+Roadmap+Meeting> in Lillestr?m on September 16 and 17, I'd like to restart the discussion on licensing of openEHR specifications and artefacts (mainly archetypes, but also potentially templates and terminology sets).
As of now, the specifications are licensed using the Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/> (CC-B-ND) license, while the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/> (CC-BY-SA) is used for artefacts. Several issues have been raised about this choice of licences. Feel free to add to this list, I'm bound to have forgot some issues: CC-BY-ND (for specs): ? Theoretically, a hostile takeover of the openEHR Foundation might leave the openEHR specs dead, as with the CC-BY-ND only the copyright holder (the Foundation) has the rights to modify them. A forkable license like for instance CC-BY-SA would solve this issue. Global registering of the openEHR trademark would keep any derivates to be branded as "openEHR". CC-BY-SA (for artefacts): ? Commercial implementers might avoid using CC-BY-SA artefacts because the license requires any published modifications of the work to be licensed using the same license. This might lead implementers to believe the license would require them to license their entire software product as CC-BY-SA. There are several examples of CC-BY-SA works being used in copyrighted works, such as Wikipedia articles being used in newspapers, but this is probably reliant on a benign licensor, which any normal commercial company can't rely 100% on. The way I see it, this problem could be solved in one of two ways: o Use the CC-BY license, which retains the attribution clause, but doesn't require any derivative works to use the same license. This has the disadvantage of enabling proprietary tweaking of archetypes, which could potentially ruin interoperability. o Retain the CC-BY-SA license, but add an explicit clause that allows all implementers to use artefacts in closed-source, proprietary products with any license they like. Artefacts published by themselves, as standalone archetypes, templates or terminology sets would still be bound by the ShareAlike clause. This is supported by Creative Commons via the CC+<https://wiki.creativecommons.org/CCPlus> protocol. I realise these issues will ultimately be decided by the board of the openEHR Foundation, but if the community can come to some kind of consensus on this issue I would hope it'd send them a strong signal. Kind regards, Silje Ljosland Bakke Coordinator, National Editorial Board for Archetypes, National ICT Norway Adviser, R&D dept, E-health section, Bergen Hospital Trust Tel. +47 40203298 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.openehr.org/pipermail/openehr-technical_lists.openehr.org/attachments/20141001/5e2d6c81/attachment-0001.html>
