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

[William Waites]

> We therefore recommend that models and their associated data should be published under a Creative Commons license
> which provide a simple, standardized way to give permission to share and use creative work.

This suggestion is a problem: CC licenses are not intended for
software. CC0 is the only one that works for software. Models
are software.

> I really feel that being more flexible on the licensing issue is important. I hope that you can agree to my suggestion.

I agree with this. There is no problem in my view releasing
software under well-established BSD or MIT licenses. They are
pretty much universally compatible and require only attribution.
I do not see a strong argument for saying that people cannot
require attribution. It is, after all, the norm in academia to
the extent that it’s considered misconduct to not do it!

As I mentioned, I favour the GPL for software licensing myself,
unless contributing to somebody else’s project where they’ve 
already chosen a license. But I won’t die on that hill here
because I know that others strongly disagree.

If we separate out software and data, and do not require CC0,
the ODL is also a reasonable choice for data. 

Flexibility is good. But this is a complicated area. There is
scope for an entire paper on licensing issues. This paper is
already much too long. Perhaps we should trim this section,
sketch out the topic in broad strokes (like I did in my first
paragraph up thread) and leave a detailed exposition to future
work?

-w