[Xesam] The Ontology Open Source Project and OSCAF - 2nd try

[Ivan Frade]

Hi,

2009/5/29 Sebastian Trüg <strueg at mandriva.com>

> Hi everybody,
>
> after the long discussion on the Xesam list which ended in mid air and a
> long
> private discussion with members of the former Nepomuk project and OSCAF we
> came up with a compromise. Let me mention the most important points:


All this emails is based on the assumption that OSCAF must exists. There is
no good reason for that (except burocracy overload, veto power for certain
people, and pervert the meritocracy way to do the things).

You say "compromise". I guess that happens when you have two solutions and
find a middle term. In this case we have: a good solution (open source
developement) and a second solution that is the same, but adding a layer of
useless burocracy on top (that does no actual work and gets money). Either
you clarify what is the value that OSCAF add or it shouldn't be added.


> 1. OSCAF
> There was a lot of concern about OSCAF. However, OSCAF has always been
> intended to be an open and non-profit organization to give an "official"
> face
> to the desktop ontology maintenance. It is not driven by a specific
> company,
> nor will it hold any copyright over the ontologies. You can look at it as
> the
> KDE e.V. for the desktop ontologies. The "scary" texts on the homepage will
> be
> changed, the semanticdesktop.org domain will be transferred to OSCAF.
> The latter is important since we need the domain to stay with an impartial
> player.


 XESAM maintaining nepomuk otologies:
1) There is ontology maintenance
2) It is driven by meritocracy = the people who does the work
3) The copyright works as in any other open source project
4) No fees/burocracy -> just work
5) No "scary" texts, or legal subterfuges.


 Besides, KDE e.V.  (or GNOME Foundation) doesn't have veto power over the
contents of the respective projects.


> 2. The actual development
> The actual development will happen on freedesktop.org. We can reuse
> existing
> development facilities such as an svn, mailing lists, task trackers, and so
> on. Whenever a release is to be made the new version will be uploaded to
> the
> OSCAF server (might not be that important to "us" desktop developers at the
> moment but is for semantic web compatibility).


 As i said few mails ago, The open source community does the work and put
the resources, and OSCAF "tag" a release (and gets the money). Sounds
unfair.

>
> 3. Copyright
> The ontologies will be released under a free licence. Contributors will
> keep
> their copyright. We propose a dual MIT/CCBY licensing since ontologies can
> be
> seen as creative work rather than real source-code.
>

Not sure about this. Not sure even if it is relevant at all. The current
Nepomuk license is open enough to allow a open source developement.


> 4. Maintenance
> Within the Nepomuk project tools have been developed to ensure the quality
> and
> the validity of the ontologies. We propose to install these on the
> development
> server (freedesktop) to ensure that
> - commits do not break backwards-compatibility
> - commits do not introduce contradictions
> - etc.


Probably those tools are open source already. i dont see the big deal here.

Is this a compromise everybody can live with?
> Please comment.
>

I dont like it. We are here to build ontologies (or improve the existent
ones). For that we just need people working
and Infrastructure; everything else is superfluous. OSCAF is not providing
any of those ingredients (and adding problems on top). The conclusion is
easy.

Regards,

Ivan
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