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

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

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:
>
> 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).

1. and 2. sounds great

> 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).
> "

Just to expose myself as "legally challenged" could you clarify that a
consumer applies this dual-licensing scheme by selecting either one of
the MIT or CC-BY licenses to use the work under?

As for the license choices I think they are good.

> 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.

Uh! This sounds mighty cool!

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

I'm a happy camper :-)

-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel