Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Thomas Beale <thomas.beale AT oceaninformatics.com>]

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 for our wiki page on this issue.

- thomas beale