[ Note: I think -qa would be a better place where to discuss this, as it
is the list where UDD development is happening. Setting M-F-T
accordingly. ]
On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 12:27:29PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:'
What is the license of the collection of data?
Not the script to collect it (I do notice the GPL in the header of above
referenced script), but the *database* of knowledge that is composed.
Most of the stuff is from packages themselves. Debian packages are
under a number of different licenses, so the answer is a collection
of various free (and or non-free) licenses, depending on the package.
If I understand correctly what Jonas is aiming at, that's not (yet) a
satisfactory answer. The license of a collection of a data might very
well be different than the license of the individual pieces of data
itself. I'm not expert on database licensing, but the underlying
intuition here is that there might be a creative effort in assemblying
the data, and that _that_ creative act might be copyrightable and hence
have a license in itself.
In the UDD case, the data collection is destroyed and recreated (with
some minor exception, for the historical tables) at each database
updated pulse. Hence the creativity is mostly captured by the scripts
that do this job.
Still, it is likely that in the future more and more people interested
in UDD will ask what is the license of the collection as opposed
to..., as it is a topic of increasing interest together with the big
data movement.
It would be wise hence to have a proper data collection license
associated to the UDD database. A popular one is ODBL
http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ . I suggest we license the
_collection_ that way, also pointing to the sources creating the
database, which will be under their own license.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . z...@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
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