[cc-licenses] Query on CC-BY-SA waivers

Thomas Beale thomas.beale at oceaninformatics.com
Mon Sep 12 14:21:17 EDT 2011


Hi,
I am new here. The organisation I am involved with is openEHR.org, a 
non-profit foundation for creating specifications, software and other 
artefacts for e-health. All of these are meant to be free and open. For 
the software we have a normal open source licence. For the 
specifications we are hesitating about a CC-BY licence, one that ensures 
the spec is shared freely but always kept intact and always attributed.

The point of my post here is the licence for the 3rd kind of artefact - 
something called an 'archetype'. It is a formal, textual artefact, 
similar to a programming language file defining a 'class', and 
archetypes can have a relationship to each other similar to inheritance 
between classes e.g. in Java, Python etc.

These archetypes are created by health professionals to define the 
information used inside systems, and are meant to be free and open. 
Currently openEHR.org has proposed CC-BY-SA. The idea of SA, rather than 
just CC-BY is to prevent anyone making a specialised 'descendant' 
archetype (i.e. a derived artefact) and making it commercially 
licensable, and preventing anyone creating the same thing for free. So - 
that's what CC-BY-SA seems to be for.

But - we don't want to prevent other kinds of derived artefact that are 
not themselves archetypes, e.g. generated code skeletons etc. Now, 
CC-BY-SA would normally apply to these as well. To prevent that, we 
would have to include a 'waiver' on those kinds of derivative artefacts, 
as seems to be possible with CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Now the difficult part. Let's say openEHR.org publishes archetype #1. 
Let's say the Australian Department of Health makes a specialisation of 
that (reusing the archetype #1, as is the intention), called archetype 
#1.1. They copyright it, and duly include the CC-BY-SA license, and 
publish it openly. But to make it usable for software developers, it 
needs that waiver as well.

  * does the original waiver travel with the license to the derived
    artefact?
  * do they have to - as the copyright owner - write a new waiver?

thanks for any help on this issue - it is consuming some time in our 
organisation! See here 
<http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/Archetype+licensing+-+the+case+for+CC-BY-SA>for 
our wiki page on this issue.

- thomas beale

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