determine license

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Description of the action item
Determine appropriate license for the DevOnt


Please provide any relevant information/links below
http://marinemetadata.org/community/teams/ontdevices/mtgs/am20100518

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 19 May 2010 at 10:19

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Original comment by [email protected] on 19 May 2010 at 11:12

• Added labels: Component-DevOnt
• Removed labels: DevOnt

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An excerpt from:
http://sciencecommons.org/resources/readingroom/ontology-copyright-licensing-con
siderations/
-- Ontology Copyright Licensing Considerations:

"There are several reasonable ways to license ontologies. But it must be kept 
in mind
that an important goal of publicly shared ontologies is to foster community
involvement (which necessitates granting rights to modify and extend the 
ontology)
and interoperability (we want to avoid license conflicts in the future if 
ontologies
have to be combined or made to interoperate). The best way to avoid license 
conflicts
is to place an ontology in the public domain—that is, to release it without
restrictions. This can be done using CC0. This gives users maximum freedom and
ensures maximum compatibility with all other licenses."

"However, some creators may want to retain rights of attribution. In that case, 
they
may make use of licenses that require attribution only, such as the Creative 
Commons
Attribution license. The drawback of this license is that since attribution is
mandated, it may over time become more of a burden than a benefit (because as 
the
list of contributors grows very large, the attribution requirements results in
“attribution stacking”, where the number of people who need attribution 
become so
large that it becomes not only meaningless but also a significant 
administrative and
legal burden on future users)."

Original comment by [email protected] on 22 May 2010 at 4:31

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Examples of ontologies using the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 
license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ or previous version):

- http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/ -- FOAF Vocabulary Specification 0.97

- http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/ -- Semantically-Interlinked Online 
Communities
Ontology

- http://www.qudt.org/ -- QUDT - Quantities, Units, Dimensions and Data Types 
in OWL
and XML

- http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/ -- GoodRelations Ontology

- http://swan.mindinformatics.org/ontology.html -- SWAN Ontology ecosystem

Original comment by [email protected] on 22 May 2010 at 5:00

[GoogleCodeExporter]

John: I have included some examples of ontologies using the CC-BY-SA license in 
this
issue entry, so I would be inclined to use it for DevOnt (but I'm not an expert 
about
licenses in general). You commended a "CC Data" license in the telecon but I 
don't
seem to find concrete references describing this license. Can you provide a 
pointer?
 Thanks.  --Carlos

Original comment by [email protected] on 22 May 2010 at 5:11