[okfn-help] [ckan-discuss] Request for 'Other (Attribution)' on license list?

John Bywater john.bywater at appropriatesoftware.net
Thu Feb 18 15:32:39 GMT 2010


Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On 13 January 2010 20:35, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Can we add 'Other (Attribution)' to license list? We have 'Other
>> (Public Domain)' - which is really useful. Non-standard attribution
> 
> Done and deployed to http://www.ckan.net. Also released v0.2 of
> licenses "package" which includes this and Other (Public Domain)
> items:
> 
> <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/licenses/0.2>
> 

While I remember, in the long term, I reckon it would be most useful to
present this data set as a RESTful service. That way, other services
could pull data from this package at run time, rather than at compile
time. Updates would then propagate immediately and automatically, rather
than after a system upgrade of depending services.

Of course, for reliability and performance, depending services could
cache the data. There could be a licensesclient package (or one for each
language) for easy integration by depending services.

Each license might be assigned a permanent and unique ID, so that
corrections to names can be supported. But that wouldn't be necessary if
the license names are immutable (and unique).

There are probably lots of other considerations too, but I just thought 
I'd share my thoughts. :))

J.


>> licenses are also common. Especially on terms and conditions in
>> academia and official institutions. E.g. the EU:
>>
>>  http://ec.europa.eu/geninfo/legal_notices_en.htm#copyright
>>
>> "Reproduction is authorised, provided the source is acknowledged, save
>> where otherwise stated."
> 
> Yes indeed. In the long term I think we'd like to pass these through
> some official process to have them approved as
> http://www.opendefinition.org/ compliant but it seems a good interim
> solution to have this generic category.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Rufus





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