I shall address the tidying of the licences.

You can call them bugs if you want, but they aren’t. How do I send you a patch? I can’t. If I change the LICENSE.txt file without explicit confirmation from you, then I strongly doubt it has legality. How do I get commit rights to sites where you don’t have commit rights? The primary “bug” is that there’s no unambiguous license to the CML spec, such that someone can start using it without having to contact you for explicit permission.

The reciprocity offer “if you find a bug .. fix it” has not aged well. Few people believe it’s true. Searching now, page after page of projects say things like “If you find a bug or misbehavior, please let us know, so that we can fix it.” Not, “if you find a bug, send us the fix.” Your view places a high barrier to entry and implies a moral obligation that I personally dislike. Pointing out a bug *is* getting involved, and I don’t want the extra responsibility of commit rights.

Are you actually saying that unless I’m willing to spend, what, a day on straightening things up for you, then it’s not going to change? Do you presume that I have more free time for this than you do?

I don’t know how the CML code in InChI is at all relevant to this discussion. The CML schema that I’m talking about is different code and a difference license than the LGPL CML parser in InChI. In addition, you misremember OpenEye’s request. In the email you posted to the OB list, they asked for either the BSD license *or* a waiver for the LGPL requirement “to enable the end user to be able to replace and rebuild the executable with an alternate version of the LGPL code”, because they ship .a file and statically linked binaries, with no mechanism to rebuild.

There are a variety of sites where CML is found. In some of these CML schema is codistributed with code, others it stands alone. I can think of at least 3 places which variously use GPL, LGPL, Apache and Artistic 2.0. Some of these licensing decisions were outside my control. As you know we had a considerable discussion on the Blue Obelisk list about the licensing of CML in InChI where I was under pressure to change the CML licence from LGPL to BSD because a software company had requested the InChI group to do this. I have not been able to get the consent of my co-author on this (I haven’t tried very hard). And formally therefore I can’t migrate the code – I would have to get someone to rewrite it without looking at the code.

There is a technical problem as to where the licence resides. If it’s inside each file there is a major problem of maintenance. If it’s on a site (as technically it is for Sourceforge) then it covers the Schema – which I regard as declarative code.

The current schemas have been developed by Joe Townsend and are on http://www.xml-cml.org. It appears that the licence information is not attached. It should be and I have to try to (a) get the password to the site and permission to change it (b) find resources to do it. Again, I make the standard Open Source offer that if you find a bug – and this is a bug – then you are welcome to join the project and fix it.

I agree that I have made mistake in the past and have tried to fix them as I have time. As an example I started this blog as CC-NC and then about 1-2 years in was persuaded to change. The CC-BY licence was attached to the WordPress skin. When the WordPress software was upgraded (I am not allowed to have access) the licence got dropped off. I didn’t notice this and I cannot technically do this. I have added a simple statement to the “about” on the site.

So the licences attached to CML code and schema need considerable tidying up. These are bugs in a complex software system, not a deliberate act. I have made my intention clear and if you wish to help implement it you are very welcome.

The situation with commercial publishing transactions is quite different. It is their primary business to understand licences. It is clear that for many of them it is a deliberate act to use NC. Moreover unless projects such as CML which depend on voluntary contributions the publishers are charging authors 3000 USD for each NC licence. Give me 3000 USD and I’ll get someone to tidy up CML.

In our email exchange of 2 years ago you said you would update the codebase to say “Artistic 2.0″ because the current statement does not specify which Artistic Version you mean, and 1.0 is incompatible with the GPL. Your “glib” written use of the underspecified phrase “Artistic license” in 1996 is of course quite similar to how others say “This work is published Under a Creative Commons License” without specifying just which license they mean.

If you, with your long experience in dealing with copyright issues and licenses, find it difficult to fully specify the licenses of the software you write, and difficult to maintain those licenses over time even with access to the repository, then you can well understand why so many people, who have little experience in these matters, find it very confusing!

I acknowledge that in a subsequent post you add
“(I hold my hand up and admit I got some details wrong); and for misinterpreting their motives. I may well have misrepresented them, but since I am not aware of major policy statements from RSC on Open Access, Licensing of Content, and their reaction to the Hargreaves report on intellectual property and copyright I have to make my own judgments.”

I acnowledge the bit in parentheses, but – in your own words, it’s (mumble). Corrections should be specific, and at the very least appear in the post to which they apply, rather than six posts up the page. You often update the body of posts, but not in this case, so it remains with its major premise based on an inaccurate anecdote.

I reiterate, in case no-one gets my point, that because we agreed to release what OSCAR needed for the training, the rest of the speculation abour RSC and our motives, which were based on the erroreous report, collapses. OA, and Hargreaves, is irrelevant to what was readily agreed a year ago to non-OA content.

The primary problem is licence maintenance. Some of the exposed software is on servers where licence information has not always been copied to every file. Ultimately this is my responsibility but I am relatively stretched for resources, and there are servers where it is difficult for me to access. If you would like to volunteer to clean up the licences on the CML sites I would be delighted and will work to give you access.

I have not used “CML Schema is distributed under a Creative Commons license, allowing redistribution but NOT derivative works.” for many years. It is possible that it still resides in old files – again if you find them I am happy to give you permission to access them. If there were a magic button that would refresh licences on all the sites I would press it.