[open-science] Share Alike? Or not?

[Klaus Graf]

CC only concerns the Copyright, not patents.

Klaus Graf

2012/6/14 Matthew Todd <matthew.todd at sydney.edu.au>:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Another licence question. Our open science projects on The Synaptic Leap are
> covered by a creative commons licence - currently a slightly out-of-date
> CC-BY-2.5.
>
> The open source drug discovery for malaria project (taking place on the same
> site, but also elsewhere) is generically covered by CC-BY-3.0
>
> http://openwetware.org/wiki/OSDDMalaria:GSK_Arylpyrrole_Series:Story_so_far
>
> We need to deal with the various inconsistencies, and since we're writing up
> the first paper on the malaria work we need to firm up the overall licence.
> This brought up the following fact: I don't know whether we should be Share
> Alike or not.
>
> My feeling is that anyone should be able to use whatever we do, provided
> there is attribution. To be honest our desire for attribution is mainly
> about insisting on good practice - don't use something without quoting the
> source. Partly it's about wanting to try to recruit more people to a unified
> project.
>
> However, there's a question about whether we ought to be insisting on Share
> Alike. I need clarification on the following from knowledgeable people:
>
> The Share Alike licence we'd use
> (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) includes the following
> phrase: "If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may
> distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this
> one"
>
> The key word is "distribute", meaning that under the terms of that licence
> it would be possible for a company to take the results from our malaria
> work, internalise those results and use them to make money via a patent,
> correct? Since that process does not involve "distributing" anything?
>
> Is that correct? I am keen not to bar commercial spin-offs from our work. I
> am keen to avoid licences that might make companies wary. Naturally those
> spin-offs should not restrict what we are doing in any way.
>
> By NOT using share-alike, are we exposing ourselves to some difficult
> situation we've not predicted?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mat
>
>
> --
> MATTHEW TODD | Senior Lecturer and Honours Coordinator
> School of Chemistry | Faculty of Science
>
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