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

Thu Feb 16 18:58:06 GMT 2012

On 16 February 2012 18:42, Greg Grossmeier <greg at grossmeier.net> wrote:
> <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?

Generic catch-alls for situations where either license is known (but
not in list -- e.g. there are a whole variety of attribution only
licenses out there) or license isn't certain but is believed to be in
a certain category.

> 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.

other-at is supposed to be for open attribution-style licenses that
aren't listed.

> 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.

Possibly but its a frequent real world need. We could improve their
description (adding a description field to the license metadata would
be really useful in fact - perhaps we should file an issue).

> 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?

Could have a rename. OSI approved = OSI compliant in this setup (I
wanted someting common for OSI and OD stuff ...)

> 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

Done. Thanks!

Rufus

> I think that's it for now :)
>
> Best,
>
> Greg
>
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