[cc-devel] Finding a license description
Jim Eng
jimeng at umich.edu
Tue Feb 24 22:36:27 EST 2009
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for your replies. The sum of the parts is fine. It doesn't
have to be a single sentence. But we're looking for a short paragraph
that describes the license. If we get that by concatenating
descriptions of the various parts, so be it.
Jim
On Feb 24, 2009, at 4:55 PM, Nathan Yergler wrote:
> Hi Jim --
>
> So the problem here is that the RDF you're looking at was generated
> programmatically from existing systems. One of our ongoing
> goals/challenges is to make reality match what we claim; that is, that
> the RDF is the canonical representation of the license. I'm happy to
> report that we're going to be putting some directed effort into this
> in the next month or so, but I expect there will be some rough spots.
> Like this one. The reason there's no description for the "compound"
> licenses is that the descriptions you're seeing are actually for the
> particular license elements (ie, "BY" or "NC"), not the entire
> license. I suppose to make the RDF match reality we should purge all
> of those dc:description elements, since calling them the description
> of the license is potentially inaccurate.
>
> It might be useful to find out what you expect a reasonable value of
> dc:description for a License would be. If it's a one sentence summary
> of the license, I'm not sure we have an analogous "feature" right now
> on the site.
>
> Nathan
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Jim Eng <jimeng at umich.edu> wrote:
>> I am looking at the license metadata from the licenses directory of
>> the liblicense-0.8.1 zip file. I'm wondering about the logic for
>> finding a license description. The metadata defines 376 licenses,
>> and
>> only a few of them have "dc:description" elements. Those with
>> descriptions are the simple licenses ("by", "nc", "nd", "sa"). The
>> composite licenses (e.g. "by-nc-nd", "by-nc-sa", "by-nc", "by-nd-nc",
>> "by-nd", "by-sa", "nc-sa") do not contain definition elements.
>
>>
>> Suppose I want to display an plain-English (or plain-French or plain-
>> Chinese or whatever locale my user requires) description of a "by-nc-
>> nd" license for a particular jurisdiction. I would start with the
>> most recent version of that license for the jurisdiction (2.5 in most
>> cases or 3.0 if the jurisdiction is the USA) and find that it does
>> not
>> have a description. So do I then look for the three licenses ("by",
>> "nc" and "nd") and combine their descriptions to get the description
>> of "by-nc-nd"?
>>
>> If the answer to the last question is "yes", here's a follow-up
>> question: It looks like the most recent general description of "by"
>> is
>> 3.0, but most (or all?) of the licenses for separate jurisdictions
>> have descriptions in version 2.5. Which should we use -- the
>> description for the preferred locale for the general 3.0 "by" license
>> or the description for the preferred locale for the specific
>> jurisdiction's 2.5 "by" license? For "nc" and "nd", do I use the 1.0
>> version unless the jurisdiction is "jp", in which case, do I use the
>> 2.0 description?
>>
>> The metadata in the license files seems to be silent on the question
>> of how to find an appropriate description unless it's included in the
>> license itself (or in a license referenced in an "isReplacedBy" tag
>> or
>> a "source" tag). By that I mean that the metadata for version 3.0 of
>> the "by-nc-nd" license makes no reference to any prior versions or to
>> the "by", "nc" or "nd" licenses. That makes me wonder if the plain-
>> language description for a particular locale and jurisdition is
>> defined somewhere else?
>
>>
>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
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