nhsengland / it-standards

IT Standards for NHS England. Documented in markdown and managed as code.
https://nhsengland.github.io/it-standards/
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Proposal for New Standard: Software & Content License #2

Closed simplybenuk closed 3 years ago

simplybenuk commented 3 years ago

Proposed name/title

Software & Content Licensing

Purpose and description

To recommend a standard way in which NHS software code and content should be licensed. This will also help during procurement phases. Existing software that does not conform to these standards could be identified as exceptions. The GDS way use the following which I feel would be sensible to replicate:

Unless stated otherwise, the codebase is released under the MIT License. This covers both the codebase and any sample code in the documentation.

The documentation is © Crown copyright and available under the terms of the Open Government 3.0 licence.

Information domain this standard would relate to

Not sure, this is quite over reaching.

Existing related standards?

None listed in the standards catalogue, but does relate to the git repo license

References to related external standards

This is proposed based on the existing GDS-Way licensing

TotallyInformation commented 3 years ago

Hi Ben, thanks for this.

You are suggesting MIT rather than Open Gov License v2.0? I thought that was the recommendation for most things published by UK gov and related orgs?

simplybenuk commented 3 years ago

Hi Julian,

Not replacing but sitting alongside.

When I was doing some digging about what to license FutureNHS under I can across Licensing - The GDS Way which said to use MIT for code and OGL for documentation/content.

My proposal for FutureNHS is that the code base will be shared via MIT, but all content added to the platform will be by default published as Official classification and under the OGL license by default.

The OGL license for this repo without MIT makes sense as it's not code, so I'm not suggesting replacing that, but adding a general new standard for applications to adhere would be useful.

TotallyInformation commented 3 years ago

Nice! OK, I am going to circulate this to other colleagues but this is absolutely the kind of thing we are looking for.

Are you able to contribute some initial text into the repo? We certainly need a statement on license standards anyway.

TotallyInformation commented 3 years ago

I will check the PR shortly but happy to have this in stage 3 now. I don't think there will be any issue with getting to stage 4.