3 Years ago Rufus Pollock met up with me in Cambridge – I think in conjunction with concern over European legislation on copyright. He told me that he was starting “knowledge forge” – a similar approach to sourceforge, but for knowledge, not code. Rufus has enormous enthusiasm, great knowledge about many areas and when he asked me to be on his advisory board of OKFN I accepted, mainly because I felt he was someone who was going to help change the world for the better, rather than because I understood in detail what this was about. I’m not sure that I still do, but he has recently posted about the OKF defintion:
This chemspider blog post expresses considerable uncertainty as to the respective roles and relationship of the Open (Knowledge/Data) Definition and Creative Commons. This kind of uncertainty, particularly as to whether the OD and CC are in some way competing ’standards’, is something I’ve increasingly encountered over the last year or so. I therefore really think this is something that it is important to clarify. Below is my effort to do so.
and continues:
1. The Open Knowledge/Data definition is (like it says) a definition. It is not a license. In this respect it resembles the open source definition (on which it is modelled).
2. Its aim is to lay out a set of simple principles that make it clear what we mean when we say a ‘work’ (be it a dataset of a sonnet) is ‘open’. Informally this involves providing freedom of access, reuse and redistribution to the work (or rather providing freedom of access under a license that permits these things). The full set of principles can be found in the definition.
3. Like the open source definition it has a list of ‘conformant/compatible’ licenses. These may be found at: http://opendefinition.org/licenses/.
PMR: This is EXTREMELY helpful. As Rufus says, if I want an Open Source Licence I can go to Open Source Initiative This lists many licences that conform and I know that by picking one (I generally use Artisitic) I will conform to the OSI definition. Here is the list of licences which conform to the Open Knowledge definition:
- Conformant Licenses
The point is that by choosing ANY one of these I know that I will conform to the principles of the definition. I therefore regard the definition as a meta-licence (I don’t know whether this is a neologism) in the same way as XML is a meta-markup-language that allows the construction or markup language and gives rules for their conformance.
and he adds more comment:
4. This is unlike Creative Commons whose explicit aim is to provide licenses. While all of the CC licenses are more ‘liberal’ (or ‘open’ even) than traditional copyright not all of the licenses are ‘open’ in the sense of the Definition.
5. This is not surprising — CC is about providing license choice and flexibility, not about providing a consistent set of licenses embodying a particular approach. In particular it is not the case that a particular CC license is ‘compatible’ with a given other CC license in the sense that one can intermix material made available under the different licenses. For example, any CC non-commercial license is incompatible with the CC Attribution-ShareAlike (by-sa) license.
6. By contrast one would hope and expect that any license which is conformant with the Open Knowledge/Data Definition would be compatible with any other such license — in the sense that one could freely combine two separate works made available under (different) open licenses together. This is important as one of the major benefits of an openness is to permit freedom of sharing and reuse in the open knowledge ‘commons’. Again this is very similar to the situation with the Open Source Definition.
7. Thus, in my opinion, the Definition is not a rival to Creative Commons but a complement which seeks to do something different. In particular the Definition does not develop licenses but CC does (many of which are conformant with the Definition). CC does not attempt to define a ’standard’ but the Definition clearly does. By linking to a CC license you are saying: my stuff is available under this specific license. When you link to the Open Definition you are saying: my stuff meets this general standard.
PMR: here are some well-known licences that do not conform:
The reason why CC-NC does not conform is that it restricts the full use of the content or object. That is why I don’t generally feel it is useful for science. (This blog is CC-BY, I just have to get the button changed).
RP: As an aside: I think this is where some people may get misled by the Creative Commons name since the set of CC licenses do not (necessarily) result in the creation of a “commons” — works made available under different CC licenses cannot necessarily be mixed together. (This is not a criticism of CC, by the way. At lease in terms of licenses, CC is about a wide choice. However it is noteworthy that recent CC project’s such as ccLearn have, I belive, explicitly focused on a particular (open) license — in ccLearn’s case CC Attribution).
This is a separate but important point – I suspect it is difficult – though not impossible – to create a commons solely using licences, even under CC-BY. It needs the political, economic, socialogocal and philosophical dimensions as well.
So do I eat my own dog food? There is nothing that says I have to share everything with everyone all the time and I hope this is generally realised. However there should not be obvious conflicts where these are avoidable. I publish in non-Open journals, but I publish in Open ones where possible. I do not require my colleagues to adopt my views. However being an advocate of Open Data I have to practice it where possible.
Open Data has turned out to be much harder than I thought. So I am extremely grateful for the OKFN collection of Open Knowledge licences. It’s certainly premature to say “one is the best for science”, so we labelled CrystalEye – WWMM with the OKFN “Open Data” rather than a licence. In a sense that says:
“at this stage intention is more important than details”
Yes, the data can be abused and yes, we couldn’t defend it in court very easily. But we are primjarily interested in doing science and we’ll take that risk.