[od-discuss] Announcing the Open Definition Licenses Service

[Greg Grossmeier]

<quote name="Rufus Pollock" date="2012-02-16" time="18:58:06 +0000">
> On 16 February 2012 18:42, Greg Grossmeier <greg at grossmeier.net> wrote:
> > 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.

/me nods

> > 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).

Agree that adding a clear definition/description of the category would
be a good place to start. I wonder how easy it will be given the
multitude of corner-cases (eg: think of the long discussions on
license-discuss for OSI approvals or debian-legal ;) )

> > 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 ...)

Agree something common useful/pretty; I just like "most accurate" more
than "pretty" sometimes :) Since it's supposed to be modeling the world
of licenses out there, I guess describing the categories using the terms
those categories use to describe themselves is useful?

> > 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!

You're welcome! And thanks!

Greg