[okfn-discuss] [od-discuss] Announcing the Open Definition Licenses Service

Thu Feb 16 18:42:21 GMT 2012

<quote name="Rufus Pollock" date="2012-02-16" time="14:52:09 +0000">

> The service is ultra simple in purpose and function. It provides:
> 
> * Information on licenses for open data, open content, and open-source
> software in machine readable form (JSON)
> * A simple web API that allows you retrieve this information over the
> web — including using javascript in a browser via JSONP

Great! A programmatic way of getting this info should be useful to some
developers out there.

A couple of questions (which I asked on IRC, but might as well duplicate
here):

1) "other-at/closed/nc/open/pd": What is the use case for these?

I ask because I worry about their use. For example, other-at has this in
its json:

    "is_okd_compliant": true, 
    "is_osi_compliant": false, 

I can think of a theoretical license that requires attribution (but
isn't non-commercial, isn't closed, and isn't "open" (whatever that
means)) that isn't okd-compliant.

I worry about these other-* categories as they are
overlapping/non-exclusive and undefined. I expect there to be as many
interpretations of these categories as their are users of the service.

2) "osi-compliant" seems like a misnomer. I say that because many
licenses could be OSI compliant but not OSI approved. I assume the
licenses that are marked "osi-compliant" are actually just the list of
licenses that are OSI approved, no?

3) CC0 and domain-software: false. I proposed a merge request on this as
CC0 is ok for software (according to CC and FSF, at least). See the
merge at:
https://github.com/okfn/licenses/pull/8

I think that's it for now :)

Best,

Greg