[Esip-documentation] Question on licensing of "Attribute Convention for Data Discovery 1.3" wiki page content

[John Graybeal]

All, Erin,

My takes:

0) My understanding is that what you're talking about is entirely covered by fair use, though what the license seems to desire (with all of its references and citations and modification clauses, oy) may not really be satisfied.
1) Standards should not be restricted from reuse, including discussion, rewording, or annotation. (Fraught though that may seem.)
2) I discourage rewording for purely legal reasons. We put a lot of time into agreeing on the wording, which is sometimes subtle. Ideally, wording 'improvements' should be presented/discussed by the Documentation Committee, but I wouldn't legally restrict them.
3) The canonical location of the standard must continue to be unambiguous, including in any copies made. 
4) If there are copies published by ESIP, they should be automatically tied to the canonical source, to avoid synchronization issues (n.b., the content at the "Latest Version URI" does change).
5) I recall no discussion of any distribution restriction on the part of the people developing the standard, and had no expectation of any such restriction.

Therefore, my first preference is to encourage ESIP to make clear that (a) copying it is fine, and (b) it is the framing of the website that is under GPDL, not the content. This is perhaps a prompt toward changing that license, which I consider too broad for just this reason. Just the act of reading and understanding the license adds a complexity that discourages reuse.

As a temporary workaround, it is OK to host it somewhere/anywhere else, if that really opens the licensing. But amending the web license, at least on that page, would be worth it..

Publishing automatically generated/updated versions is a nice thing to pursue as time allows. It particularly should be compatible with the way we published this, which provides both a 'latest versiont' URI (http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery <http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery>) and a versioned URI (http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_1-3 <http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_1-3>). (Some re-users will want to use the former, and some will want to use the latter.) 

John


> On May 26, 2018, at 5:55 PM, Erin Robinson via Esip-documentation <esip-documentation at lists.esipfed.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi All - In a quick back and forth with Martin, I expressed ESIP's general desire to not increase barriers to usage. Martin suggested that an ESIP hosted machine readable version would solve his issues and also allow for the synchronization as well as solve Apache Software Foundation legal. 
> 
> I wonder if someone on this list would be willing to make that conversion from wiki page to XML, JSON or CSV and post this to an esipfed github repo? I have added Annie Burgess, ESIP Lab director who can make sure this gets to our organizational GitHub account. 
> 
> Thanks in advance - 
> Erin 
> 
>  
> 
> Erin Robinson
> Executive Director
> ESIP - Earth Science Information Partners
> esipfed.org <http://esipfed.org/> | 314.369.9954
> 
> On Sat, May 26, 2018 at 4:51 PM, Martin Desruisseaux <martin.desruisseaux at geomatys.com <mailto:martin.desruisseaux at geomatys.com>> wrote:
> Le 26/05/2018 à 03:09, Erin Robinson a écrit :
>> Hi Martin - Taking this off the list briefly to say I would prefer this be as simple as possible that you are able to use the entire quote in SIS and to not take a long time with bureaucratic hurdles... Do you have a proposed solution that might link back or reference the ACDD quote on ESIP wiki? I think this is the spirit of our community even if license may have other implications. 
> 
> The documentation already contains links in the "See Also" section. For example in [1], there is a "ESIP reference" below each constant. But for now those links were inserted and maintained by hand.
> If I copy the definitions verbatim, there is still the synchronization issue raised earlier in this thread. Also (even if unlikely), users downloading an Apache software presume they are allowed to change anything in it, including those definitions. A technical alternative may be to have those definitions in a machine-readable file hosted on ESIP. It may be as simple as key-value pairs, e.g.
> 
> title = An identifier for the data set, provided by and unique within its naming authority (… etc …)
> Or it may be XML or JSON or CSV, at ESIP choice. I could easily parse those files and insert the content automatically at documentation-generation time. I think this approach would also satisfy the Apache Software Foundation on a legal point of view, since the definitions would not be in Apache source tree.
> 
>     Thanks again!
> 
>         Martin
> [1] http://sis.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/sis/storage/netcdf/AttributeNames.html#TITLE <http://sis.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/sis/storage/netcdf/AttributeNames.html#TITLE>
> 
> 
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John Graybeal
jbgraybeal at mindspring.com



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