[open-linguistics] META-NET Data Liberation Campaign

Wed Dec 5 18:22:13 UTC 2012

On 5 December 2012 16:15, Nancy Ide <ide at cs.vassar.edu> wrote:
> A look at the impact of the promotion of GNU (copyleft) and "share-alike"
> licenses makes my point: promotion of these licenses as the "good citizen's
> license" has had a subtle but pervasive impact on software and data
> licensing, in that these licenses are at this point the de facto licenses of
> choice. Unfortunately, such licenses are often not suitable for commercial
> use because of the requirement to distribute results under the same terms.

Describing copyleft/share-alike licences as 'not suitable for
commercial use' is a nice tagline, but it's patently false, with
numerous examples to the contrary. The more accurate 'not suitable for
direct commercialisation of proprietary derivatives' doesn't roll off
the tongue quite so easily, but is less likely to be perceived as a
(particularly weak) strawman.

> I would recommend promotion of something like the Apache 2.0 license
> (http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0), even if (as pointed out in the
> note below) it is not likely that such a license would be acceptable in this
> instance.

The Apache licence is unsuitable as a data licence. MIT/BSD-style
licences, or CC-BY, would make a better option for your aims.

-- 
<Sefam> Are any of the mentors around?
<jimregan> yes, they're the ones trolling you