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

[William Waites]

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