[okfn-discuss] Open Source movie definition

Wed Apr 1 14:54:22 UTC 2009

2009/3/31 Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com>:
>> http://www.opendefinition.org/1.0 in a nutshell says:
>> 1. You should be able to get the work (in a modifiable source form)
>
> Unfortunately, the OKD does not even *mention* the Sources of Production.

It says: "The work must also be available in a convenient and
modifiable form." Do you have a suggestion for a mod here that would
improve this to be more specific (without becoming too verbose?)

> A parenthetic mention here is not legally binding.

Just to be clear: the OKD is a set of principles *not* a license.
There is a list of conformant licenses here:
<http://www.opendefinition.org/licenses/>

> Unless the Sources (such as uncompressed media) and the supporting
> Sources (such as tools needed to reconstruct the end product) are made
> available to the Users of that product, then they will not have the
> opportunity to build upon that work.

I quite agree that sources are crucial. To my knowledge (though I may
be wrong) the (open) CC licenses don't really talk about this. Of
course for software you've always had a clear source/binary
distinction and this has even been written into the licenses.

Such a distinction clearly also exists for content (pdf vs. the raw
document from which the pdf was made). However, I think it is rather
less agreed exactly what is source and what is binary in most areas
(one of our retired projects from 4/5 years ago was aiming at trying
to address this: <http://okfn.org/iai/>).

If you actually wanted something in a license the obvious approach
here would be to mod an existing open license (e.g. CC by-sa) with an
addendum saying: "And in addition you must make available the source
files" (perhaps with some examples of what this would mean).

Rufus