[okfn-discuss] Open Definition forges ahead - get involved!

Tue Dec 18 23:11:57 UTC 2012

I, for one, think that the most important thing in all these considerations
is to make sure that all copyleft focus is on the smallest number of
licenses. Copyleft is great for freedom but causes incompatibilities. We
need to focus on having a single acceptable winner for any copyleft license
for any given medium. For software, that is clearly already the GPL, so
nobody should ever try to push any copyleft license that is incompatible
with the GPL. For other media, CC-BY-SA seems to be the winning copyleft
choice. The use of any other copyleft license should be either compatible
or should be for a medium where these other license do not apply well.

Cheers,
Aaron

--
Aaron Wolf
wolftune.com

On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 4:47 PM, Mike Linksvayer <ml at gondwanaland.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Rafael Pezzi <rafael.pezzi at ufrgs.br>
> wrote:
> > 1) I do not understand why software is formally excluded from the open
> > definition. Since it is a definition it could very well embrace previous
> > works. Isn't the open definition compatible with free software
> definition?
> >
> > It seems odd to me having a Definition of Free Cultural Works that
> excludes
> > one particular kind of cultural work.
>
> For historical reasons, free/open source software has separate
> institutions, including licenses and license vetting standards and
> bodies. Honestly, I think this is suboptimal, but will probably takes
> years if not decades to change. I am glad that someone agrees with me.
> :)
>
> OKD 1.1 notes "Software is excluded despite its obvious centrality
> because it is already adequately addressed by previous work."
>
> OKD 1.2 draft is slightly more informative "Software is excluded
> despite its obvious centrality because it is already adequately
> addressed by previous work, including the [Open Source
> Definition](http://www.opensource.org/docs/osd) (OSD), upon which this
> document is modeled."
>
> > 2) Why not use an free version control system such as
> http://gitorious.org/
> > for consistency? See this text by Ben Mako Hill for reference.
>
> Glad you asked (having sent
> http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html to this list recently
> myself, regarding a different thread). OKFN's numerous repositories
> are on Github, and someone pointed to an OD repository there when I
> asked about versioning the OKD some time ago. Because I didn't know
> where it was versioned, I had thrown a proposed revision into a
> personal repository on gitorious. Anyway, for now I'll mirror just the
> opendefinition repository on gitorious at
> https://gitorious.org/floss-docs-diffs/opendefinition in case anyone
> wants to watch or contribute via a web interface with no proprietary
> software involved. :)
>
> In the longer term I'd guess discussion of the OSSD, noted in the
> post, will include or provoke further discussion of the
> appropriateness, value, irony, etc of OSSD-on-OSSD-[non-]conforming
> services. But I hope such is fairly measured, as I think there's a lot
> to discuss around open services and their relation to the
> sustainability (in whatever way you want it to mean) of open data,
> open government and the like closer to OKFN's core activities, beyond
> slogans. ;-)
>
> Mike
>
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