Questions on recommended licenses

[matentzn]

Currently, the following are flagged for not using standard/recommended licenses:

WARN SBO license: 'http://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0' is not a recommended license WARN MAMO license: 'http://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0' is not a recommended license WARN HP license: 'https://hpo.jax.org/app/license' is not a recommended license WARN GSSO license: 'http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0' is not a recommended license WARN CIO license: 'https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.en.html' is not a recommended license

I can understand HP, but the other ones seem pretty standard to me.. Any reason we cant add these to the registry?

[jamesaoverton]

Principle 1 is pretty clear: "OBO Foundry Ontologies MUST EITHER be released under a Creative Commons CC-BY license version 3.0 or later, OR released into the public domain under CC0. It should be clearly stated in the ontology file."

In my opinion, it's good to be that strict about licenses. Interactions between licenses are really difficult to judge. Adding GPL into the mix is particularly worrisome.

[ghost]

The reason ontologies were released under other licenses such as the artistic license was pretty clear. If you have a fork and both branches use the same ID for different terms, the ontologies become pretty useless as annotation tools. I know that IRIs kind of solve that in an ideal world. However, database curation still very largely relies on just IDs, or CURIEs (which are mostly the same for ontologies, at least in the life sciences). When we chose the artistic license for SBO (and later KiSAO, TEDDY and MAMO), we were actually following GO. Moving the goalpost can be annoying. An open license is an open license.. CC licenses are great, and for many things CC0 is actually perfect. However, there are areas were total freedom does not help. And standards (Guidelines, Ontologies, and data formats) are arguably an example. IMHO

[Superraptor]

We chose Apache 2.0 for the GSSO after much consideration for two reasons: (1) the GSSO contains data which may potentially be exploited by transphobic or homophobic entities via modification, we wanted legal recourse provided by section 4 of the Apache license which CC0 and CC-BY did not have, and (2) we included IRIs and information from other entities above (like HP) and we felt the license needed to be at least as strict as their license.

The first reason we were initially skeptical about ever needing, but it turns out some group in another country has taken a subsection of the GSSO and used it for potential criminal identification, and neither the CC0 or CC-BY would provide us any recourse in those kinds of scenarios.

[matentzn]

@gambardella @Superraptor

Thank you very much for your thoughtful comments!

Of course, choosing an appropriate license is up to you in the end :) As you say, open is open! Thanks for clarifying your reasons! At least we have this discussion and its very good arguments documented now. Our motivation is merely to simplify re-use, and obviously unification always comes with trade offs. I will leave this open for a bit in case there are other people that want to comment, but if someone in the future comes across this ticket: you can close it. There are no further action items!

[marcrr]

Hi @matentzn

We have now updated CIO to CC0:

https://github.com/BgeeDB/confidence-information-ontology

We have taken the opportunity to change the licence of HOM also to CC0. Somehow on github it was GPL3 but on OBO Foundry CC-BY.

https://github.com/BgeeDB/homology-ontology

Can we assume that these changes will be automatically mirrored to the OBO Foundry page or do we need to edit the entry at OBO Foundry?

[matentzn]

Hey @marcrr I made to PRs to that end.. Do they both look right to you?

[nlharris]

Looks like the PRs have been merged, so can we close this ticket?

[matentzn]

For now we close this! We have some recommendations and decided to stick with them for simplicity's sake!