[okfn-discuss] New project - Open Data licence

Fri Aug 31 09:57:56 UTC 2007

Jordan Hatcher's lists wrote:
> All,
> 
> One of my newer projects is to lead the update to the Talis Community  
> Licence, which is an open data licence that is listed as being  
> compliant with the OKFN.  This email is just to notify the list and  
> ask for anyone who wants to contact me about the update to feel free  
> to do so and to solicit any comments you might have at this time.  
> I'll post a draft of the update whenever it is ready.

That's great to hear Jordan. TCL would be a useful addition to the 'open 
license' collection.

> The idea for the licence update is:
> 
> -- expand it beyond the EU Database Right to cover Database copyright  
> as well

Excellent idea.

> -- make it compliant with existing law by scaling back the scope of  
> the rights it covers

Ditto.

> -- try to make it as universal/worldwide in scope as possible

Ditto.

> -- keep it OKFN compliant
> 
> The licence itself doesn't do too much in terms of restrictions  
> except for a Share Alike requirement.  It has been suggested to me  
> that SA would be particularly bad for the sciences and data  
> integration projects.  I very much would like to hear your thoughts  
> on what you'd like to see with the licence.

Personally I'm a waverer on this issue. Its not really clear to me how 
the sharealike issues on data differ fundamentally from those on code. 
The main concern seems to centre on the degree of reach-through, that is 
just how broad is the definition of a derivative work. It also seems to 
me that without sharealike the dangers of data being locked away behind 
access-control provisions is even greater than for code (this perhaps 
has some analogies to the sofware as a service issue). Some previous 
thoughts on the topic:

https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OpenData/Message/100.html
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2007-April/000391.html
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2007-April/000403.html
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2007-June/000443.html
http://www.systemed.net/blog/entry060311122655.html

Phew! Putting this list together makes me think some of this should be 
distilled into a blog post ...

~rufus