What do we mean by free?

[jonathanrobie]

Here are the minutes from last week:

What do we mean by "free"?

We prefer licenses that:

• Are applicable to all users without additional negotiation or contact
• Allow translation
• Allow derivatives
• Allow integration with other tools
• Allow free distribution
• Require attribution (and we like a pointer to the authoritative source in the attribution)
• Are standard licenses

Some licenses we like:

• CC0, CC-by, CC-by-SA, CC-NC
• Free Translate? (we need to evaluate)
• for code: MIT, BSD, Apache, Affero GPL

Issue: Do we want to make an authoritative list of licenses we seek? Issue: Do we want a Good Housekeep Seal of Approval (GH-sb)?

[jonathanrobie]

Should we add something about being freely accessible on the Web? Physical accessibility is part of being free.

I think things like version control, issues lists etc. are more about being responsibly curated. Should I add an issue for that?

[rdeblois1960]

As far as I am concerned, you can add those items you mentioned, Jonathan.

[rdeblois1960]

I have a little problem with the item "allow derivatives". If this refers to translations or adaptations into other languages, OK. If this is about people altering the original product, I have my reservations, especially if it is maintained under the same name.

[dirkroorda]

Suppose I use your text (by you I mean any one who "owns" a text) and turn it into text-fabric format. I think I have then made a derivative. Would I want to use the same name? Yes and no. Yes in the sense of: the text one can reconstruct from my text-fabric data is faithfully the same as your text. No in the sense of: I have made a particular representation, with which you can do powerful things. Now, if you do not want those powerful things to happen, then I do not consider your text to be open. One of the mean reasons for openness is not that I can do the same things with your text as you do, but that I can unleash the power of a community to do things with your text that you have not thought of, or have not the resources to accomplish. Any concept of open that does not allow this dynamics is not an interesting concept of open.

Maybe it just boils down to: "what's in a name?" If I can do my things with your text under a different name, I'm perfectly happy. I even think this is good etiquette. We should not usurp the name of other people's work when we pursue our own purposes. Unless we have the blessing of the original owner.

[dirkroorda]

I also like the Unlicense for software. I tend to use it for all things I do. It is one of the equivalents of CC0 (Public Domain) for software.

[rdeblois1960]

I have no issue with any of what you described below. I am only concerned about the content, not the format. Take SDBH as an example. I am totally fine with people reformatting it, translating it into other languages, incorporating it in whatever other tool. I am only not sure that I would like people to change the contents of the original.

Does that make sense?

Best wishes

Reinier

Van: Dirk Roorda notifications@github.com Verzonden: Tuesday, March 27, 2018 12:52 PM Aan: biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance copenhagen-alliance@noreply.github.com CC: Reinier de Blois rdeblois@biblesocieties.org; Comment comment@noreply.github.com Onderwerp: Re: [biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance] What do we mean by free? (#5)

Suppose I use your text (by you I mean any one who "owns" a text) and turn it into text-fabric format. I think I have then made a derivative. Would I want to use the same name? Yes and no. Yes in the sense of: the text one can reconstruct from my text-fabric data is faithfully the same as your text. No in the sense of: I have made a particular representation, with which you can do powerful things. Now, if you do not want those powerful things to happen, then I do not consider your text to be open. One of the mean reasons for openness is not that I can do the same things with your text as you do, but that I can unleash the power of a community to do things with your text that you have not thought of, or have not the resources to accomplish. Any concept of open that does not allow this dynamics is not an interesting concept of open.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance/issues/5#issuecomment-376481896 , or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AFMNNTHT6q_e3JxofsjpbNiQBywvmwn9ks5tihnTgaJpZM4S7tDn . https://github.com/notifications/beacon/AFMNNQUxghfi6V4LLkc0MdaXuFJHb633ks5tihnTgaJpZM4S7tDn.gif

--

This email and any files sent with it are confidential and intended only for the person it is addressed to. If you have received this message in error please let us know immediately and delete it. The content of this message belongs to the sender and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of United Bible Societies.

United Bible Societies Association, a company limited by guarantee. Registered in England and Wales No 2264875. Registered Charity No 800058 Registered Office: Stonehill Green, Westlea, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN5 7PJ, England.

[jonathanrobie]

@rdeblois1960 raises an important issue that we discussed at the meeting: the Creative Commons licenses do not distinguish derivatives that change the base text from derivatives that do not.

This is one of the reasons organizations have chosen to roll their own licenses.

[jtauber]

Yes, I think this is the key licensing issues as raised by @rdeblois1960 and @DavidIB.

Clearly people want a distinction between "I've lemmatised your critical text" and "I've changed your critical text" and the CC licenses don't enable that distinction as they are both derivative works.

There are some fuzzy areas such as the SBLGNT accentuation errors I pointed out in Copenhagen.

What makes things really difficult, though, is further downstream derivation. For example, it's one thing if Tyndale requires me to seek explicit permission to lemmatise their text (to get around the lack of distinction between the two types of derivative work mentioned above) but then what license do I make the result available under? It gets complex very fast.

[rdeblois1960]

By the way, the UBS Global Leadership Team is in principle OK with us releasing the two semantic lexicons SDBG and SDBH. If we can resolve the licensing issue we are good to go.

[DavidIB]

Wow- that's great news Reinier

David IB

At 07:38 28/03/2018, Reinier de Blois wrote:

By the way, the UBS Global Leadership Team is in principle OK with us releasing the two semantic lexicons SDBG and SDBH. If we can resolve the licensing issue we are good to go.

­ You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance/issues/5#issuecomment-376778242view it on GitHub, or https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABnQuuuoUOpKk2XmpQvj0Jb5RSOTqHMgks5tiy_pgaJpZM4S7tDnmute the thread.

[DavidIB]

@jtauber, you have correctly interpreted the concerns of @rdeblois1960 and myself. With our Hebrew OT, for example, we have jumped through hoops to make sure it accurately represents the Leningrad codex better than predecessors. We don't want someone to come along and 'correct' bits of it back to a printed edition when they spot 'errors', and then proclaim theirs is more accurate without giving us the chance to educate them. Or they might decide that they know Greek better than you do and change your parsing, or 'imporove' Reinier's semantic domains. But we DO want them to apply this data in many wonderful and unforseen ways, and make derivative works that maximise the usefulness of our effort, and we DO want them to report any errors they THINK they have found. Is it time to get a lawyer to produce an ND clause for a CC licence version 5? It would say (in suitably legal jargon):

• the work can be reformatted or translated so long as the data is left unchanged (the wording of this is a little tricky in that formatting may be part of the 'data')
• the data should not be changed but errors should be reported to the curating body
• the data CAN be changed if the curating body doesn't publish a corrected version within 12 months, or reply with a reason for rejecting the change
• the ND clause lapses if the curator does not respond to requests for corrections within 24 months because this indicates that the individual or organisation no longer exists or has lost interest.

Do we know any friendly (ie free) lawyers? I imagine that this licence would be of interest to many more people than Bible scholars

[rdeblois1960]

Now we’re talking! I would not mind to pay the lawyer for adding something like this, if the amount would be reasonable and we would all agree that this is the way forward.

--

This email and any files sent with it are confidential and intended only for the person it is addressed to. If you have received this message in error please let us know immediately and delete it. The content of this message belongs to the sender and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of United Bible Societies.

United Bible Societies Association, a company limited by guarantee. Registered in England and Wales No 2264875. Registered Charity No 800058 Registered Office: Stonehill Green, Westlea, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN5 7PJ, England.

[jonathanrobie]

We need a license like that. Ideally, it would be a standard license that is well known and widely used in the broader academic community, which has the same concerns. Ideally, it would be Creative Commons. I will try to bring this up with Creative Commons, but if they can't work rather quickly, we probably need to get a lawyer and roll our own to start with and hope for something better down the road.

[jonathanrobie]

I'm going to write a blog post about this today or in the next few days. It's interesting and important.

[dirkroorda]

I have read through The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Jonathan, did you bring that in? What David and Reinier are wary of is an unfriendly fork. These things are rare, and I wonder whether we need the legal system to regulate that. It might prove impossible in an open source/access world. I think there are other measures in place that help you. When new users look for a source, they will find your repo. They might find forks, but your repo has the best reputation. So they pick that. If they have issues with it, they'll cooperate with you by means of the repo's issue list. If they are not satisfied with your cooperation, they might fork the repo. But they do not have the same reputation as you have. It will be an uphill battle. If they persevere, then there are two copies of the work around, incompatible, but that is what the user base wants then.

[dirkroorda]

I think DANS is not waiting to accept more types of licensing. In fact, they discourage the NC of CC-BY-NC because of its dim legal status. They also downplay the BY, because in the academic world there are codes of professional ethics that take care of attribution, without a need for the legal system to kick in. Probably the world of books and texts is a rougher arena, but we are talking mainly about data, without clear authors in the sense of the copyright laws.

[jcuenod]

Just to add another fuzzy area. I have been using CCAT's parallel data for WLC/LXX. The problem is that I didn't build the tool that converts it - I had a db that someone else had already done the conversion for. That db's hebrew didn't parallel my text perfectly so I just did a kind of rough-and-ready approximation that works in the vast majority of cases. I know that there are issues though and, for example, I never align multiple words in the source/target language but CCAT does do that.

So I have definitely changed the data (and honestly, made it worse in some respects) but I needed/wanted to make those changes because of how my data is set up. If you need me to explain more I'm happy to do so.

[jonathanrobie]

I think DANS is not waiting to accept more types of licensing. In fact, they discourage the NC of CC-BY-NC because of its dim legal status. They also downplay the BY, because in the academic world there are codes of professional ethics that take care of attribution, without a need for the legal system to kick in.

Don't say this too loudly, but I never intend to sue anyone. My license agreements try to tell people what I am asking them to do. I do want attribution, and I like having a convenient place to tell them how to attribute my work - including a URL to the original.

As a user, when I find a copy of a copy of a copy of some work on the Internet, the first thing I want to know is where I can find the authoritative source. So I like licensing agreements that tell people to provide that information, because they may not think of it. In general, people look a the license and do the right thing.

When I was a consultant, I used contracts the same way. Not to put myself in a position to sue, but as a way of being very clear about what we were agreeing to.

[jag3773]

For certain resources, it seems like the suggestion of CC "Attribution-Non-Derivs combined with a freetranslate license" would probably grant the freedom we are looking for.

As I understand it, the CC BY-ND license (at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/) does permit format shifts, as long as the content is not altered. That would likely be needed for us to integrate it into our apps. At the same time, the Free Translate license (https://unfoldingword.org/freetranslate/) would grant translators the rights they need to begin a translation. Especially for existing resources this may be a good solution for @DavidIB and @rdeblois1960's situations.

(edited to correct SA to ND)

[dirkroorda]

What James points out is really important to me. The line between a format shift and a content change is fuzzy. There are various examples, and James already gave one. Here is what you do when you use other people's data:

• you make a selection. That is by definition a change of content.
• you ignore some fine distinctions in the data that you do not need. Again: change of content.
• you aggregate data. So most data you throw away.
• you use data for feeding machine learning algorithms.
• you add new distinctions you do need: you enrich the content.
• you add links from the source data to other data: you enrich the content
• you publish the data as part of a new whole, where the pieces of original data might not be recognizable (if you have used the data as index, or if you only use aggregates of the source data, or the outcomes of machine learned patterns).

[dirkroorda]

In the analog word, we tend to think of "works". We know what we can and cannot do with other people's works. Unlicensed copying: no. Fair use quotation: yes.

But in this digital data world, there is another business: we work with data as commodities, not as things with baked in IP.

This might also explain why most of the licenses coming from books, art, literature, seem so beside the point for data. And then software is yet another type of animal.

[jtauber]

@dirkroorda's list reminded me of this blog post of mine which similarly tried to capture the sorts of things you should be able to do to data for it to be "open".

https://jktauber.com/2015/11/11/technical-aspects-openness/

The point of that post was that these are often not just licensing issues but format issues. For example a CC0-licensed PDF scan of a printed page doesn't fit many of these criteria, even though the license is very open.

Here was my list:

correctable — can I make corrections if I find mistakes? verifiable — can I write code to check for errors? reproducible — can I reproduce the results others have found? extensible — can I extend it with my own data or data from other sources? queryable — can I search, filter, or sort the data to get subsets of interest? reusable — can I use the same data for multiple applications? repurposable — can I use the data for purposes not conceived of initially? adaptable — can I produce different variants of the data applicable to different users?

Again, this list was less about whether the license allows it and more about whether the format allows it, although obviously the license could separately prohibit these (as is desired in some contexts for "correctable").

[jonathanrobie]

I will open another issue for formats.

[jonathanrobie]

Talked to @jag3773 today, here are two resources he recommends.

The Christian Commons https://unfoldingword.org/assets/docs/tcc/The-Christian-Commons_2.0.2.pdf

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change https://www.amazon.com/Content-Trap-Strategists-Digital-Change-ebook/dp/B015BCX08A/

[jonathanrobie]

https://choosealicense.com/ is an extremely useful resource for seeing the main options available for software and content.

[jag3773]

There is also a lot to be learned from the open educational resources space (arguably we are a part of that?). Some helpful links are:

• https://iskme.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001003263-Introduction-to-OER
• https://iskme.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000980626-Usage-rights
• Background on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources
• US Department of Education overview page, https://tech.ed.gov/open/

Very useful definition from that last link:

In the 2017 National Education Technology Plan, the Department defines openly licensed educational resources as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others.

... and also...

The Department has announced final regulations that require, with certain exceptions, that grantees receiving Department funds under a competitive grant program openly license copyrightable grant deliverables created with those funds.

[jonathanrobie]

I like this definition:

In the 2017 National Education Technology Plan, the Department defines openly licensed educational resources as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a license that permits their free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others.

Is this a definition we could adopt for our own use, changing the wording slightly?

So far, the biggest thing standing in the way involves resources where people do not want others to change the base text because they want those changes to be made centrally. With standard licenses, the mechanism for that is to use Attribution + Sharealike, with a link to the definitive source in the attribution. That much can be specified in the formal license. The resource that the attribution points to can request that any changes be clearly labelled and communicated via issues or in some other way, but that is not legally enforceable because it is not part of the official license.

Some questions:

• How important is the ability to legally enforce the proscription against making changes to the base text, as long as a link to the definitive source is provided along with information on how to communicate changes and a request that people do so?

Suppose we created a new license that allows translation and enhancement as long as the base text is not modified.

• Is the cost of developing and maintaining a new kind of license justified by a clear benefit over the Attribution + Sharealike approach listed above?
• Is the cost of negotiating a non-standard license with people who have questions justified by a clear benefit over the Attribution + Sharealike approach listed above?
• Could this license be developed in a wider community than the members of the Copenhagen Alliance? What would be the appropriate community? Could Creative Commons do this? Or some Humanities or library science organization? Or ...

[dirkroorda]

FYI: A good read by a scholar who has spend years on the study of research data and practices around it: Christine Borgman. See the open access article Exploring openness in data and science: What is “open,” to whom, when, and why?

Some quotes:

Data creators can preserve their intellectual property rights while providing open access. Creative Commons licenses (CC) are widely used for data, but are an incomplete solution. While copyright protection applies to acts of creativity, many types of data are considered “facts.” The Open Data Commons licensing system addresses this intellectual property and licensing conundrum (Miller, Styles, & Heath, 2008).

The more general problem is the lack of agreement on who owns, or should own, research datasets (Borgman, 2015)

[DavidIB]

If we do go down the route of a new licence, I don't think we should do this in our little corner. These are issues which (I imagine) prevent others from putting data into public licences in many disciplines.

And if we do go down that route, there's another issue we might want to tackle at the same time: Non-Commercial clause is is often avoided because it is percieved to prevent use by non-profits, and by those small projects that simply use onsite advertising to pay their hosting costs. It would be good if there was a non-commercial clause that specified what it actually means - ie

• use by any company with employees or a private company that gives a salary to its owner.
• charging users to purchase or subscribe for products that include the data

Commercial companies are not thereby prevented from using the data because they can contact the owner and agree a price or percentage for using the data.

I think a nuanced and robust NC clause would encourage a lot of data developers to make their data available because this would increase their profile with the additional incentive of hopefully attracting the attention of buyers. Win win.

[dirkroorda]

I found this helpful: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/NonCommercial_interpretation Upshot: NC is intentionally vague. A CC-NC license cannot be narrowed down or expanded by specifying what you mean by NC. NC does not restrict the kind of entity that reuses the material, but only the kind of use of the material. A commercial company may reuse CC-NC material, but may not use it commercially. And here of course, are the grey areas.

[jag3773]

@dirkroorda is right on the mark concerning the NC clause.

A license that does not allow someone to change the content is not open. It may be a public license that allows free distribution but it can't qualify as "open" if it doesn't allow the text to be modified. This is my own opinion, of course, but it comports well with every definition of "open" that I've seen, including the ones adopted by the US Department of Education, the Free Software Foundation, the OER Commons, etc.

Take this quote from the OER Commons page:

Open educational resources are and always will be free in digital form, but not all free resources are OER. Free resources may be temporarily free or may be restricted from use at some time in the future (including by the addition of fees to access those resources). Moreover, free resources, which may not be modified, adapted, or redistributed without express permissions from the copyright holder, are not OER.

The crucial turning point for openness is the ability to modify the content to fit the needs of the user (licensee). A truly "open" license allows someone to make changes and use the resource as they desire.

[jcuenod]

I think it's a bad idea to create a new license.

1. It's difficult and really requires testing in courts before it's clear what its weaknesses and strengths are and before people will want to adopt it.
2. Having a license that's not recognisable is useless in the FOSS world because you can't ask groups to saddle themselves to a license whose entailments are unknown.
3. Definitely, doing it within the confines of biblical digital humanities will make adoption much more difficult.

[dirkroorda]

Sooner or later companies that have built products out of biblical resources, and publishers that thrive on scholarly work, must realise that the legal protection of their business model is eroding. They'll have to survive without that protection, or perish. Which is a good thing (the first one). Otherwise a company with exclusive rights to a datasource has the monopoly for all products based on that source. That is bad because other companies/parties might have greater creative impulses.

What I mean to say is: we can fuss about the nitty-gritty of licenses, but most of us and our "customers" are already with one leg in a world where it does not make sense anymore. New output of the scholarly process will not be handed over to publishers anymore under exclusive licenses.

In our case: we see the BHSA data being used for BibleBento, for ParaBible, and individual researchers in ways we could not have foreseen. It would be absurd if the original creators of this data (who themselves stand on the shoulders of giants), tried to control all that.

Then the OpenScriptures initiative makes it crystal clear that with a crowd of people you can recreate valuable data and release it unencumbered. They help to create a level playing field. The publishers, by nature, have skewed the playing field. We are now witnessing the undoing of that.

When the playing field is level, the CC licenses are perfectly capable of regulating proper use of resources. Adopting those licenses now helps leveling the grounds.

[jonathanrobie]

I agree with @jcuenod - creating our own license is not very helpful because people will still need lawyers to pore over it unless it is very well known and accepted. Convincing someone like Creative Commons to add a new kind of license could be helpful.

But I wonder if we can find recommended ways to achieve what people need with existing, accepted licenses instead. The biggest sticking point seems to be the use of no-deriviatives versus attribution + share alike.

[jonathanrobie]

In an informal vote on the Slack channel, we agreed that we cannot call a no-derivatives license open or recommend it.

We also agreed that we will not attempt to create a license that protects the base text from modification but allows other derivatives on our own. There was interest in seeing whether a larger entity like Creative Commons might be interested in doing so and in generally seeing what advice the have for us.

I propose that we resolve this issue as follows:

• A work is freely licensed if the license permits free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. A work in the public domain is free by definition.
• Standard licenses are strongly preferred because the terms are well-understood by a large community and it is easy to get information on them. For content, the following licenses are free: CC0, CC-by, CC-by-SA. Requiring attribution is generally desirable so that the definitive source for a resource is easy to find.
• The following license is free for non-commercial use: CC-NC. We see this as less desirable because it limits the use of derivative works, but recognize that some resources cannot be released more freely.
• CC-by-ND and similar no-derivatives licenses are not free.

[rdeblois1960]

OK, this may be a good definition of what we consider free.

At the same time, we need to be practical when it comes to the resources that we want, and what the IP-holders are willing to stipulate. If we come to them with these criteria I am afraid that we will not be very successful.

If we want access to existing Bible Translations there will only be a few that can be considered free according to this standard. I can only think of the WEB Bible. We can expect the same attitude for some of the dictionaries that we want to have, such as SDBH and SDBG.

Maybe, for our initiative to be successful, we need to settle for something less than free, but which includes:

• Open access
• Reformatting allowed
• Selection allowed (like in some dictionaries you do not need all fields; in a translation you do not need to use the glossary or the footnotes)
• Translation allowed

I think we should be pragmatic rather than dogmatic in this area.

Reinier

Van: Jonathan Robie notifications@github.com Verzonden: Thursday, April 12, 2018 8:25 PM Aan: biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance copenhagen-alliance@noreply.github.com CC: Reinier de Blois rdeblois@biblesocieties.org; Mention mention@noreply.github.com Onderwerp: Re: [biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance] What do we mean by free? (#5)

In an informal vote on the Slack channel, we agreed that we cannot call a no-derivatives license open or recommend it.

We also agreed that we will not attempt to create a license that protects the base text from modification but allows other derivatives on our own. There was interest in seeing whether a larger entity like Creative Commons might be interested in doing so and in generally seeing what advice the have for us.

I propose that we resolve this issue as follows:

• A work is freely licensed if the license permits free use, reuse, modification, and sharing with others. A work in the public domain is free by definition.
• Standard licenses are strongly preferred because the terms are well-understood by a large community and it is easy to get information on them. For content, the following licenses are free: CC0, CC-by, CC-by-SA. Requiring attribution is generally desirable so that the definitive source for a resource is easy to find.
• The following license is free for non-commercial use: CC-NC. We see this as less desirable because it limits the use of derivative works, but recognize that some resources cannot be released more freely.
• CC-by-ND and similar no-derivatives licenses are not free.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance/issues/5#issuecomment-380900181 , or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AFMNNRLLOBHrhf0qsUsYWjTfkzQbu7uOks5tn5vhgaJpZM4S7tDn . https://github.com/notifications/beacon/AFMNNV3uuqktc9dzZIs51cJK136fky_dks5tn5vhgaJpZM4S7tDn.gif

--

This email and any files sent with it are confidential and intended only for the person it is addressed to. If you have received this message in error please let us know immediately and delete it. The content of this message belongs to the sender and the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of United Bible Societies. 

United Bible Societies Association, a company limited by guarantee. Registered in England and Wales No 2264875. Registered Charity No 800058 Registered Office: Stonehill Green, Westlea, Swindon, Wiltshire, SN5 7PJ, England.

[DavidIB]

On the freedom of ND, it is worth recording here a conversation on Slack.

@jonathanrobie said: I am not a lawyer (IANL), but it looks like you can use a no-derivs license like ND, then state additional permissions to allow translation, annotation, morphology, treebanks, etc. You cannot add restrictions to a Creative Commons license, but it seems to allow you to grant additional permissions. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/legalcode

Section 7 – Other Terms and Conditions. The Licensor shall not be bound by any additional or different terms or conditions communicated by You unless expressly agreed. Any arrangements, understandings, or agreements regarding the Licensed Material not stated herein are separate from and independent of the terms and conditions of this Public License.

@jtauber said: there’s still a challenge with what license derivative works under those additional permissions... it makes the license on my morphological annotate complicated... any customisation of licenses has knock-on effects downstream

[DavidIB]

@jonathanrobie your point about adding de-restrictions is really pertinent. What this comes to in practice is that we can signal alongside the licence that we allow things like translation, modification of format etc, and then someone who wants to make sure they are legally-grounded could email us for specific permission in what would be, in effect, a private licence. @jtauber I see your point about inheriting complex licences. In practice, you would have to pass on a ND licence and state that you have development permission. You would also have to grant development permission on your own development (if you want to). But if your work was a development by translation, and they wanted to make a translation to another language, surely they'd want to go back to the original? And if your work was a development by changing the format, and they wanted a different format, surely they'd want to go back to the original? So they would only want to develop your development if you had, in fact, changed the data. In most cases they'd want to go back to the original, wouldn't they?

So I see no reason why ND with the three additional freedoms listed by @rdeblois1960 shouldn't be regarded as 'free'.

[jonathanrobie]

Proposal: We should adapt this point from https://github.com/biblicalhumanities/copenhagen-alliance/issues/5#issuecomment-380900181 to be more accomodating, changing:

• CC-by-ND and similar no-derivatives licenses are not free.

to

• CC-by-ND and similar no-derivatives licenses are not free culture licenses, but can be used when business models or other considerations prohibit freer licenses. Works licensed with no-derivatives licenses should consider granting permissions for translation, reformatting, adding morphology or syntax trees, and annotation.

Please vote on this proposal using 👍 or 👎 .

Justification below:

If we want access to existing Bible Translations there will only be a few that can be considered free according to this standard. I can only think of the WEB Bible. We can expect the same attitude for some of the dictionaries that we want to have, such as SDBH and SDBG. Maybe, for our initiative to be successful, we need to settle for something less than free, but ...

Creative Commons actually does something like this. They describe a spectrum of free, calling some licenses "free culture licenses" but also providing licenses for less free works.

I like that approach because:

• It does not compromise on the definition of free
• It does not insult people for choosing not to be 100% free
• It provides a way for people to make things as free as they are willing to be
• It is more likely to get us buy-in from the people who have resources we want to make more free

[jonathanrobie]

I propose to close this issue as follows:

1. Adopt the text in the current README.md
2. Use issue #11 to track our use of ND resources.

Please vote on this proposal using 👍 or 👎 . Any other Emoji will be interpreted as "I can live with any decision". I will consider votes in 24 hours.

[jonathanrobie]

Closing this issue, leaving the more specific question of ND for #11.

Feel free to reopen if I have closed this prematurely.

[jtauber]

@jonathanrobie you say you're closing the issue but it's still open