On 8/24/2012 11:07 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>
> At the same time, most people want to have some idea of where data comes
> from -- some way of gauging the "authoritativeness" of the data. This
> also requires carrying forward something that looks like attribution,
> and the W3C is calling it "provenance." It may be the case that the
> desire to get credit and the need to know your sources will be solved
> with a single addition to the linked data technology.
>
If 'most people will want it' anyway, you don't need to enforce it with
a license, do you?
I think there are two different things here, 'good design' and
licensing. We don't generally try to enforce good design or good UI or
good functionality with _licensing_. Licensing is to protect the rights
of the owner, and serve their interests. Not to try to somehow enforce
that all users practice good design, somehow.
After all, even if 'most people most of the time want X', a license
(assuming it's legally enforceable) requires it _all the time_. Few
design principles are universal. Trying to put them in a license is a
mistake.
If that was really one's goal. Instead, I often see owners intentionally
confusing these things as a kind of misdirection -- they are insisting
on certain licensing terms for business reasons (which may not be
unreasonable), but when questioned on this, they try to misdirect and
say "Well, it's just good design anwyay, right?" Maybe, maybe not, but
that's not the role of licenses.
In fact, I think there are use cases involving wild remixing,
combination, and derivation of data from many different sources -- where
the requirement to always keep track of provenance will incure a
significant cost, that will sometimes change the cost/benefit
calculation of using data from a source that requires attribution,
perhaps to the point that it's no longer feasible. Design decisions in
software are never just about "is this helpful", they are always about
costs and benefits. Trying to enforce a design decision in a license
takes what should be a contextually-specific design decision and trying
to make it a universal licensing requirement. This is not about good
design.
Received on Tue Sep 11 2012 - 14:04:39 EDT