Cc-uk mailing list

[rob AT robmyers.org]

Quoting Stuart Yeates <stuart.yeates AT oucs.ox.ac.uk>:

> [I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice]
>
> rob AT robmyers.org wrote:
> > It's an interesting idea to limit editing to representatives of a particular
> > professional domain. In many ways the GPL does this implicitly for Free
> > Software, and the fact that software must run eliminates incompetent
> > contributions. I assume there are medical registries you can check to ensure
> > that contributors are who they say they are.
>
> GPL software is released that doesn't compile.

This is an objective measure of the quality of the code, and it immediately
prevents the program from being compiled and used "in production" on a 
computer
system. For medical information, harm might not be immediately obvious 
and might
only become obvious when the product is "in production", and it may be put "in
production" in uses outside a medical institution where it cannot be
competently evaluated.

I appreciate that nuclear reactor software released under the GPL that has a
slow memory leak which will cause a meltdown after two years would be
equivalent. But it's different case to a crank editing BY-SA medical
documentation and circulating it in the general community. That would be more
like someone adding malicious code

We then get on to how you identify cranks and whether uses of cultural or
technical works differ from uses of software.

> Nightly builds and other forms of snapshot frequently don't compile.
> This doesn't reflect at all negatively on the competency of those
> involved, it's merely a software engineering strategy to ensure that
> issues caused by people independently working on the same code are
> found and fixed rapidly.

Certainly. And disallowing intelligent but non-professional people from 
editing
work does reduce the amount of review and contribution. I am sure that a
project to produce medical information can competently review contributions.
And a crank  could redistribute misleading derivatives anyway. So where's the
harm in adopting a Wikipedia "self healing" model over a
medical-practitioners-only license? It still feels like medical information is
more important. Maybe.

This is a very interesting case study. :-)

> I believe that whether or not you can produce a variant of the
> licence depends on the copyright licence under which the licence
> text is released.

I have seen variant CC licences before. I was under the impression that 
you are
allowed to make them, but a quick search of CC's web site doesn't show
anything.

- Rob.