[open-government] Share-alike

Sat Sep 17 11:10:33 BST 2011

Stef,

I feel limited in my reply because I'm not clear what your "criteria for 
success" are here.  I expect they are different to mine.

> i beg to disagree you can in fact be an innovator and honor the SA.
>
>    
Agreed, you *can* be an innovator under SA.  But not insisting on SA is 
a greater incentive for innovators / entrepreneurs.

With SA, innovations tend to only happen as a result of people 
scratching their own itches.
Without SA, innovations also tend to happen as a result of people seeing 
the opportunity to make some cash.

As a consumer, I'd prefer to have innovations come thicker and faster, 
even if it means spending more cash to get it earlier.

> nope, [SA] only keeps the data free and prohibits the privatization of the
> commons. which i'd say that's not innovation but robbery.
>
>    
Making a copy of something is not robbery, we worked that out long ago 
in the debates about music piracy.  A commercial operator can produce a 
value added work without withdrawing CC By material from the commons.

>> (After all, the
>> author itself doesn't *have* to SA, only the downstream users!)
>>      
> so the one creating value should not have privileges?
>    
They can if they want, but the original question here was around the 
default licence a *city* (i.e. government) should release under.  I 
don't know why a city should keep privileges from its citizens, 
including the option for those citizens to commercialise and seek a 
business opportunity from that commercialisation.
>> depends on liberally licensed works as contributions (i.e. CC By and
>> public domain), but in turn it also allows full geodata
>> roundtripping between government-crowd-commercial.
>>      
> how can you ensure roundripping back from commercial to crowd and gov without
> an SA licence? or do you mean with roundtripping gov-crowd-corporatelockin?
>    
I used the word "allows", not "ensure".  No, I can't ensure the trip 
back from commercial.  But it is not lockin either.  Commercial 
operators cannot lock-in any IP greater than their own IP.

>> Other references: http://www.ausgoal.gov.au/the-ausgoal-licence-suite -
>> "Among those, the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) [...]
>> provides the greatest opportunities for re-use of information"
>>      
> i'd like to see the study that is the foundation for this statement.
>    
I hope some of my statements above give some illumination.  But others 
on this list may have ready access to chapter and verse.  To me it's 
simple.  The less additional clauses there are to a licence, the less 
people will be scared off by it.

A more practical example:  Many western governments (at least .au, .us, 
.ca., .uk) cannot re-use contributions into OpenStreetMap (strong SA 
geodata).  Dropping SA allows re-use in this scenario.

Brendan