[od-discuss] OANC license approval?

Mon Oct 11 10:09:04 UTC 2010

On 11 October 2010 10:40, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Someone just pointed out to me the American National Corpus project, a
> very interesting project with the subtitle "committed to open data for
> language research and education":
>
> http://www.americannationalcorpus.org/
>
> As part of the project, they distribute a bunch of data under the
> following ‘homegrown’ licence:
>
> http://www.anc.org/OANC/license.txt
>
> I'd like to ask the group whether this complies with the Open
> Knowledge Definition? In particular it would be interesting to have
> 'official' approval that this license is OKD compliant (if it indeed
> is), and to have it listed somewhere on the OD project site, e.g.:

I don't think this compliant because of restrictions on reuse, see
e.g. the clause:

<quote>
A “substantive modification” is a change to the semantic
content of the O-ANC Texts. The Licensee may not distribute
or reproduce substantively modified versions of the O-ANC
Processed Material without the prior written permission of
the copyright holders.
</quote>

Basically they've written in a strong integrity clause. Personally, I
think it would have been better to go for the 'PERL' approach and
simply require those making 'substantial modifications' to not release
it under the same name and to clearly mark it as modified from the
original version ...

> http://www.opendefinition.org/licenses/
>
> Suggest this could be a great test case for license
> evaluation/approval process! ;-)

I agree. I propose that we proceed via consensus on this list, with,
if necessary, a formal +1, 0, -1 vote (requiring all +1 or 0 for
approval).

Rufus
-- 
Open Knowledge Foundation
Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
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