[Vp-integration-subgroup] "Models are not consistently licensed"

[William Waites]

Dear Jacob,

I did watch your video and understand what you are saying. I’m also pretty well-informed about licenses and patents as they relate to software and data having been engaged with that topic in different countries (i.e. different legal contexts) since the mid-1990s.

There are several problems with your analysis.

1. It is perfectly well possible to compose together software with different licenses. We do this all the time, and very successfully. We would not have Linux distributions if this were not possible, and most of the large programs written in Python or Java or whatever with a ton of libraries that we use for scientific computing would not exist. Different communities have different cultural ideas about which kinds of licenses they prefer. Broadly, there are BSD/MIT style licenses that some like that basically only require attribution, and there are copyleft GPL style licenses that others like that additionally require derived work to also be free. This is, to a very large extent, a solved problem. As I say, most of modern computing would not be possible if we hadn’t already solved this.

2. Abandoned code is not a problem if it is properly licensed in the first place. You are perfectly free to take any GPL or MIT or BSD licensed software that has been abandoned and continue to use it and develop it. Nothing stops you. Nothing at all. You are not free to change its license without the involvement of the original authors, but why should you want to?

The claim that we can’t make software out of pieces with different licenses is demonstrably false.

The claim that we can’t use software abandoned by the original authors is also false.

It is perfectly fine to use CC0. As I said, in the USA that is equivalent to putting the software in the public domain. Not every country has the concept of public domain in the same sense, so CC0 is designed to emulate it in those cases. This is unusual, most people do not do this because they require attribution at the very least. Attribution is the norm in scientific work so it seems like public domain/CC0 is not really the best match to established practice.

I understand very well what you are doing with patents and you have been nothing but up front about it. I understand very well what patents are and how they work. I still think it’s a bad idea to propose using patents for scientific models. It’s also a pretty fringe idea. I often like fringe ideas but I don’t like this one.

It is possible to get into trouble if you try to use code released under a GPL-style copyleft license with something proprietary. This is by design, it is not by accident or ignorance. If we want to discourage this (I don’t, personally) then we can recommend the more liberal MIT/BSD style of license.

It is a very big problem when people release code with no license at all. That means we can’t do anything with it at all. I suggest that we drop the discussion about patents and simply say that it is important that model code is released under some license. The OSI maintains a decent list of appropriate licenses: https://opensource.org/licenses

Best wishes,
-w

> On 24 May 2021, at 19:06, Jacob Barhak <jacob.barhak at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks William, 
> 
> A good debate is reasonable regarding licensing. So it is welcome.
> 
> I can write a lot about it and in fact I have been having this conversation on several channels. 
> 
> There are many forms of restrictions on what you can do. Even open source licenses are despite their name are based on copyright law which is a form of legal restriction. Both copyright and patents are forms of legal restrictions. And if you want a comparison and a longer discussion, I suggest you look at the table the presentation I made for COMBINE last year:
> 	• Jacob. Barhak, Open Source and Sustainability, COMBINE 2020 October 5-9. Video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1actGnx6FwvoCcPrrF3qbnO0AmHt10WN6 starting from minute 13:10. Presentation: https://jacob-barhak.github.io/COMBINE2020_OpenSource_upload_2020_10_04.odp
> 
> Many people are unnecessarily worried about patents. I assume many times without understanding the details. I repeat again my conflict of interest, since I do hold patents. So I may be biased in your mind, yet please do check out my arguments in the presentation.  
> 
> Note that just like software licenses are not always compatible with each other, patents are not always compatible with some licenses and with intentions of all parties involved - this is many times the source for misunderstanding. Many restrictions are orthogonal to each other and need to be cleared before use.. In many cases, some work may need multiple licenses and permissions so you can use it.  It depends on many factors, including jurisdictions, time, etc. 
> 
> Specifically for CC0 - CC0 is the most unrestricting license I am aware of since it waives copyright and therefore highly compatible with many others - this is why it was mentioned as a good solution and indeed it has been widely adopted . Moreover, it resolves issues of abandoned software or with software where multiple contributors cannot agree on. So it gives life to code and provides incentives to improve progress.
> 
> If I am about to integrate a new model or a new work, I may be restricted by many restrictions, and those are coming from potentially multiple sources, especially if I am integrating multiple models. So eliminating copyright and making things compatible helps a lot. It may not be sufficient since there are still orthogonal restrictions, yet it's a good start. This is why it was recommended and indeed more and more entities are using CC0 to release work or to accumulate it in a repository. 
> 
> You mentioned CC licenses family - yes, those are nice licenses, yet some still hold restrictions and are not even compatible with each other. Here is the compatibility chart within CC license family:
> https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Wiki/cc_license_compatibility
> 
> And yes, in some cases for some entities some licenses will not match their intentions - it depends on the situation - yet if you have to bridge many intentions, it's a good idea to remove as many restrictions as possible.
> 
> Hopefully you find these explanations sufficient for now.  
> 
>               Jacob
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 24, 2021 at 8:19 AM William Waites <wwaites at ieee.org> wrote:
> I am hesitant to get involved in this particular aspect of the paper and have long since timed out on software licensing discussions. However…
> 
> The point that there are inconsistent licenses (or even absent licenses which is legally the most restricted since that defaults to “all rights reserved” essentially) and this can cause problems when assembling composite models is accurate and fair. This is a challenge that we need to address. We want to maximise the impact of the public funding of much of the kind of work that we do, which means that others need to be as free as possible to reuse our work.
> 
> It is debatable whether CC0 is appropriate. It is meant to emulate the public domain in places that do not have a legal concept of public domain. It does not require attribution, which is the normal standard for academic work. The other CC licenses that require attribution are not designed for software. Insisting on using the public domain for software and then asserting the ability to control use using patents is a novel idea, but I don’t think it is a very good one. It is also not possible in many jurisdictions that do not allow software patents.
> 
> Standards bodies also typically have patent policies which range from “disclose your patents” to “if you contribute patented stuff you must agree to never try to enforce it”. We can reasonably expect that if we produce patent-encumbered standards, nobody will use them. From a standards development point of view, this needs addressed as well.
> 
> There is also a ton of well-developed literature on free and open source software licensing and compatibility among licenses.
> 
> Best wishes,
> -w
> 
>