[od-discuss] Great post on difficulty of actually using "open" data

Wed Oct 23 19:49:43 UTC 2013

On Sun, Oct 20, 2013 at 3:20 PM, Rob Myers <rob at robmyers.org> wrote:
> On 17/10/13 11:31 AM, Luis Villa wrote:
>> Query: are we making the data-remix problem worse by approving licenses
>> that are copyleft, or that aren't explicitly compatible with each other?

We do have a question about compatibility in
http://opendefinition.org/licenses/process/ but it hasn't really been
part of conformance discussions so far. It probably should be.

Question gets at whether Open should be mere conformance, or
healthy-for-Open-ecosystem. Latter is implicit in many discussions,
and well justifies, eg foot dragging on considering incompatible and
otherwise problematic licenses. But I'd be happy for this to be
explicit in some form.

> The article identifies the bulk of the data as having bespoke NC/ND
> licenses.

No, the majority has bespoke licenses not even allowing distribution,
or no license at all. NC/ND are not the biggest problems in even this
tiny part of the world. ;-)

> That's not a problem with copyleft, although writing and using too many
> incompatible copyleft licenses is a problem.

I agree, don't think the example demonstrates a problem with copyleft.
It is barely pertinent. We could have same old debate about which
effect would be greater: more use of copyleft would cause more of
those non-open datasets to be opened, or more use of copyleft would
make open datasets harder to use, less valuable. But it would be a
hypothetical argument based on the example provided.

Mike