[odc-discuss] Open Database Licence

Wed Mar 4 15:59:20 UTC 2009

This is interesting and odd to me, because my understanding was that 
providing a share-alike license was pretty much unworkable for data -- 
not feasible to make a legally enforceable contract to these ends 
accross jurisdictions. Which is what led to the PDDL/CC0/Science Data 
Commons approach.

But apparently it is legally feasible in some cases?  Any background 
material I should read explaining how ODbL manages to work at all?

I'm also not certain what the effective difference between the Factual 
Information License and the PDDL is. "MIT style" generally means that 
that the user is free to do pretty much whatever they want with it. So 
the user might have the same rights with the PDDL or the FIL, but the 
FIL doesn't actually put anything into the public domain?  I'll have to 
read the FIL carefully; again, my understanding was that it was legally 
very complicated/infeasible to do this with factual information 
_without_ just putting it in the public domain.

Jonathan

Rufus Pollock wrote:
> 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
>   