Re: A Data License

[Raul Miller <rdm@test.legislate.com>]

Matt.Wilkie <Matt.Wilkie@gov.yk.ca> wrote:
> The license I'd like should:
> 
>     - be free of charge, money for distribution and handling is okay
>     - have freedom to modify and change and combine with other data
>     - keep original sources of data & copyright notices in all distributions
>     - nature and type of modifications/additions must be noted and described
>     - be as close to natural language/common sense as possible (a user 
>       shouldn't have to ask debian-legal what it means! ;-)
>     - not be Yet Another License if at all possible
> 
> which is all pretty close to existing free software licenses.
> The areas where I'm not so clear on what I desire deal with the
> combination of commercial/ proprietary and private/free data.

Basically, if you allow unlimited proprietary and free use there's
not much that you need to talk about -- just proper identification
and proper assignment of credit, I think.

> I'd like to -strongly- encourage the growth of free data (as in
> liberty and beer), but not necessarily discourage commercial growth.

It sounds to me like you want to start with the BSD license, and
change it to refer to you (for example, you're not the Regents of the
University of California) and change point #3 to say "Nature and type
of modifications/additions must be noted and described.".

Also, as far as I know, there's no strong concept of "source and binary
forms" for digital mapping data... you might want to change that phrase to
"any form".

> [I'm not subscribed to debian-legal, please cc me in your replies. Thank
> you.]

Ok.

-- 
Raul