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

[Sebastian Trüg]

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:

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.

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).

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.
The following copyright statement could be added to each file:

"
Copyright (c) <YEAR>, <Firstname Lastname | Company>
dual licensed MIT and CC-BY

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to 
deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING 
FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
You are free:
to Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix - to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution - You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the 
author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse 
you or your use of the work).
"

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.

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

Cheers,
Sebastian Trueg