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amiigo
Amiigo bookmarked on 2009-02-10 okfn blog open data science license

Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share.

  • Why bother about openness and licensing for data
  • It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse.
  • want people to have incentives to make their data open and for open data to be easily usable and reusable
  • good definition of openness acts as a standard that ensures different open datasets are ‘interoperable’
  • Licensing is important because it reduces uncertainty. Without a license you don’t know where you, as a user, stand: when are you allowed to use this data? Are you allowed to give to others? To distribute your own changes, etc?
  • licensing and definitions are important even though they are only a small part of the overall picture
  • If we get them wrong they will keep on getting in the way of everything else.
  • Everyone agrees that requiring attribution is OK
    • amiigo
      Amiigo on 2009-02-11
      My opinion is that there should be no requirements, including attribution, and that standards should be community-based instead of legal.
  • Even if a basic license is used it can be argued that any ‘requirements’ for attribution or share-alike should not be in a license but in ‘community norms’.
    • amiigo
      Amiigo on 2009-02-11
      Licenses and community norms are not exclusive. It's recommended to adopt a Public Domain license, and encourage attribution through community standards.
  • A license is likely to elicit at least as much, and almost certainly more, conformity with its provisions than community norms.
    • amiigo
      Amiigo on 2009-02-11
      Ease of access and should be the goal, not conformity.
  • (even to a user it is easy to comply with the open license)
    • amiigo
      Amiigo on 2009-02-11
      It is important to specifically publish using a Public Domain dedication.

This link has been bookmarked by 5 people . It was first bookmarked on 04 Feb 2009, by Joelle Nebbe-Mornod.

  • 19 Aug 09
    gweyman
    gweyman
    • Some people have argued that licensing is inappropriate (or unnecessary) for data
    • The simple answer here is yes. Whether one likes it or not there are a whole bunch of jurisdictions where there are IP rights in data(bases). Note that this does not imply any monopoly rights in any facts that data represents.
      • gweyman

        gweyman on 2009-08-19

        Question 1: Is it Important to License?

        The simple answer here is yes. Whether one likes it or not there are a whole bunch of jurisdictions where there are IP rights in data(bases). Note that this does not imply any monopoly rights.

  • 10 Feb 09
    amiigo
    Mike Chelen

    Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share.

    okfn blog open data science license

    • Why bother about openness and licensing for data
    • It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse.
    • 9 more annotations...
  • 05 Feb 09
    mbauwens
    Michel Bauwens

    A good definition of openness and the use of some form of licensing is crucial to a healthy future for the open data community

    P2P-Licenses Open-Data P2P

  • 04 Feb 09
    iphigenie
    Joelle Nebbe-Mornod

    "Qu 1. Is it important to license?

    Qu 2: What ‘restrictive’ requirements are compatible with openness? In particular does ‘open’ equate to PD only or are attribution and share-alike ‘requirements’ permitted?

    Qu 3: Community norms or licenses? Should ‘co

    open data commons

    • Thus, licensing and definitions are important even though they are only a small part of the overall picture. If we get them wrong they will keep on getting in the way of everything else. If we get them right we can stop worrying about them and focus our full energies on other things.

    • Qu 1. Is it important to license?



      Qu 2: What ‘restrictive’ requirements are compatible with openness? In particular does ‘open’ equate to PD only or are attribution and share-alike ‘requirements’ permitted?



      Qu 3: Community norms or licenses? Should ‘community norms’ or license terms be used in order to encode requirements such as attribution and share-alike?

  • 02 Feb 09
    jsicot
    Julien Sicot

    open_data