[odc-discuss] Open Database Licence

Wed Mar 4 10:29:10 UTC 2009

2009/3/3 Jonathan Rochkind <rochkind at jhu.edu>:
> Yeah, I saw people discussing those licenses, but was confused about
> what they are.
>
> I'm still confused!  That would be another good question for the FAQ,
> what's the difference between between the PDDL, the ODbL, and the
> Facutal Information License -- what would lead someone to choose one
> over the other?

Good questions. We've made a start at providing an ultra-simple
explanation on the licenses page itself:

<http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/>

This now says:

<quote>
    * Public Domain Dedication and License
          o When using the PDDL you may wish to associate a set of
Community Norms.
    * Open Database License —  "Attribution/Share-Alike for databases"
    * Factual Information License — "MIT/BSD for factual information"
</quote>

There isn't an explanatory sentence for the PDDL since the name seems
self-explanatory but if we could add something like: "Put your
database in the public domain"

It has also been suggested that we should have a brief header to each
'license' giving a human readable summary a la Creative Commons.
However the licenses already have a 'human-readable' preamble (a la
the GPL) and so I'm not sure how much benefit this would produce
(though we could make the preambles more prominent).

Rufus