[ Note: I think -qa would be a better place where to discuss this, as it is the list where UDD development is happening. Setting M-F-T accordingly. ] On Sun, Dec 16, 2012 at 12:27:29PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Sat, Dec 15, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:' > > What is the license of the collection of data? > > > > Not the script to collect it (I do notice the GPL in the header of above > > referenced script), but the *database* of knowledge that is composed. > > Most of the stuff is from packages themselves. Debian packages are > under a number of different licenses, so the answer is "a collection > of various free (and or non-free) licenses, depending on the package". If I understand correctly what Jonas is aiming at, that's not (yet) a satisfactory answer. The license of a collection of a data might very well be different than the license of the individual pieces of data itself. I'm not expert on database licensing, but the underlying intuition here is that there might be a creative effort in assemblying the data, and that _that_ creative act might be copyrightable and hence have a license in itself. In the UDD case, the data collection is destroyed and recreated (with some minor exception, for the historical tables) at each database updated pulse. Hence the creativity is mostly captured by the scripts that do this job. Still, it is likely that in the future more and more people interested in UDD will ask "what is the license of the collection as opposed to...", as it is a topic of increasing interest together with the "big data" movement. It would be wise hence to have a proper data collection license associated to the UDD database. A popular one is ODBL http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/ . I suggest we license the _collection_ that way, also pointing to the sources creating the database, which will be under their own license. Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli . . . . . . . zack@upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o . « the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature