[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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