Say you want to share music or stories or research openly on the internet but want to set certain conditions to its use. No problem, Creative Commons Licenses are right up your alley.

If you want to share software code in a similar way, the Creative Commons license isn’t so good a fit. With software, you likely have different needs owing to the way in which software code is typically used. Mostly, you’ll want to address the code’s human-readable version, or source, differently from its machine-readable version to make sure folks share your work the way you want them to. But you’re in luck again: there is a wonderful palate of open source licenses available.

Now the poser: what if you want to share structured data — things like databases, spreadsheets, and XML documents? There again, you may have special needs. You may want to make sure that certain things about the way things are sorted or filtered are made clear. For example, if you create a top ten list of best bike saddles, you may want to make sure the list is presented in the original order (or, if not, that the sorting change be noted). You also might want fine grain citations, to make it clear, for example, that you used one source for the saddle specs and another for the field testing data. This example is trivial, but for people to share large datasets (like we want businesses and researchers to do with consumers) this balance of protection and incentive to share could be vital.

Well, as far as we know, no such public license for structured data exists! We’d like to find out tomorrow that there is a license ready to jump into this role, but until we do, we’re thinking we may need to help push for the solution, which we’re now calling FOSSIL (Free & Open Source Structured Information License) We’re currently in a very exploratory phase, emailing law profs, asking questions at parties, etc. If anyone reading this knows someone we should talk to (or parties we should go to), we could definitely use help.

a little technical aside

Interestingly, DataWeb technologies may address the need for granular citation by allowing data sources to set up specific contracts for specific databits, which could individually use something like a creative commons license, for example. But there would still be a need for system licenses that address things like sorting, filtering, conversion, abbreviation, or any other sort of data manipulation. In fact, there may be a much greater need as DataWeb technologies increasingly entice people to share larger data sets…