[sio-dev] Licensing for shared ontologies

[Cameron Ross <cross@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

One of the things that needs to be considered is the Licensing model to be used for ontologies contained within the (an?) OOR.  I'm assuming that the intent is to establish a corpus of ontologies that will promote their use within both commercial and non-commercial applications.  The Eclipse Public License, the Mozilla Public License and the Apache License are all amiable to this goal.  However, ontology artifacts are more like data than software source code, so these licenses don't necessarily apply well to ontology artifacts.  The OpenCyc ontology is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode). Meanwhile, Adam Pease has suggested using the GNU Free Documentation License (see http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html).

Should the OOR dictate a particular licensing model?

Cameron.

--
Kojeware Corporation

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