Licsensing scientific data
[Please reply to debian-science mailing list - I'd like to widen the
audience a bit.]
Hi,
the somehow longish thread on the Debian Med mailing list starting at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2011/07/msg00146.html
makes me wondering what you are thinking about licensing scientific
data. For one moment I was thinking that it is a correct thing to
release scientific data under a license which does not allow changing
the data because - hey, I do not want even myself change the result of
my measurements so why should anybody else do so.
However there was some interesting argument that some data might be
in some unusable format and simply needed reformating to be used by
the usual programs which handle this kind of data.
So what the license should actually reflect is that we do not want
anybody to change the real content like changing / adding / removing
numbers or something like this. There is no need to forbid changes
which are relevant for say the MD5 sum of the file but just changing the
spacing.
What do you think about this and should we probably put this issue on
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/ProblemsToWorkOn
which lists our "problems to discuss". (BTW, this page needs to be
updated after DebConf - Sylvestre, did you by chance saved the gobby
file because gobby.debian.net was switched off and the disks have been
shredded according to zobel - please do not let me comment on this
procedure without notification of users.)
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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