OpenSearch SRU: Licensing?

["Hammond, Tony" <t.hammond@nature.com>]

Hi:

Here's a follow=up from DeWitt on the opensearch list. He raises some issues
about licensing.

Does anybody have any views on this?

Btw, we made it (SRU) onto the front page:

    http://www.opensearch.org/

:)

Cheers,

Tony



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: DeWitt Clinton <dewitt@unto.net>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:55:42 -0800
Subject: Re: [opensearch:365] Re: Draft OpenSearch Extension for SRU
To: opensearch@googlegroups.com

Thanks again, Tony.  This is great.

I'll admit that the process for adding new specs is perhaps overly ad-hoc
right now.  But I completely agree that the distinction between "community"
extensions and otherwise is ambiguous and unclear.  Not sure the best way to
clean that up really, but I agree that we should probably just update the
homepage to list all of the extensions, since it is a small enough list and
we want to maximize exposure to encourage reuse.  I've gone ahead and done
that now.

As an aside, I'd say that at this point OpenSearch is all "community," which
is a fine thing in my opinion.

Regarding licensing, since this is a new spec you may want to use the
current Creative Commons 3.0 BY or BY-SA license instead of the older 2.5
license, which was the latest at the time the original spec was authored.
 Personally I prefer BY these days, but ultimately it should be up to the
authors (unless we want to try as a community to offer more rigid guidance).

Or, if you want to try something new, the Open Web Foundation Agreement (
http://openwebfoundation.org/legal/) was designed for just this sort of
effort.  In fact, I eventually intend to track down the copyright and
trademark holders on OpenSearch (Amazon.com, mostly) and ask if they mind if
we retroactively apply the OWF agreement to the OpenSearch spec.  The
advantage of the OWF agreement over the CC license is that the OWFa
explicitly covers downstream implementor rights with respect to patents, not
just copyright.  (Disclosure: I had a hand in authoring the OWF agreement.)

-DeWitt



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