check/change license

[janpolowinski]

Git hub didn't allow to select http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ directly, but this could be the best choice. Please give feedback on this.

Critical points:

1. It should not be necessary to state for every statement where it is from, but I don't think the license requires this. A link on each website using the data should be enough. Ideally, we would allow USING without any reference to the original VISO, but require mentioning it when statements are published using different namespaces. How to do that? Grant extra rights?

2. When building software "on top of" (i.e. being driven by this ontology, this software may be put under a different license. Is this possible with the standard http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ ?

[nichtich]

Reuse of some statements is not restrictet by copyright laws anyway. CC-BY-SA would more apply to the documentation and to the ontology as whole. Just importing the ontology does not require to license the full target system but a fork of the ontology would be CC-BY-SA as well. But why not drop all restrictions and use CC0?

[janpolowinski]

We also thought about CC0, but wouldn't this allow anyone to create variants of VISO without refering back to the original ontology? Maybe this is an unrealistic scenario, but in case this should happen, there could be (in theory) multiple VISOs from different groups without any connection observable by others. I think this could contradict the idea of ontologies as shared knowledge, where many users agree on a single way of structuring things. Of course, I see this makes reuse a little bit more difficult, but still I think CC-BY-SA could be a good compromise. As long as VISO clones are only forked on GitHub, I also see the "reference the orginal"-requirement already fullfilled. Thank you for your comments! Martin, what do you prefer?

[martin-voigt]

Hi, thanks for the discussion. My points:

CC-BY-SA: As I like it it may hinders the commercial usage because it requires to reuse the same license.

CC0: I think a minimum of reference should be required.

CC-BY: My favorite since you have to say where is the information from but you can reuse it as you like.

[janpolowinski]

Hm.. I don't think CC-BY-SA hinders commercial usage: http://creativecommons.org/choose/
The only restriction (besides referencing) is that you have to use the same license if you change VISO and redistribute it. Is it necessary that companies are not only allowed to use the viso-knowledge but also merge it into their knowledge-bases which they offer at a stricter licensing than CC-BY-SA?

[janpolowinski]

For now I set the license to CC-BY-SA 4.0 international for both projects to have some licensing at all. I think switching to a less restrictive license is unproblematic, should the current license become an obstacle at some point.