[Kalzium] Kalzium Digest, Vol 11, Issue 6

[Tuomas Nurmi]

Carsten Niehaus:
> Well, I won't pay any money for scientific data. At least in germany,

Actually, the license might be one similar to GPL. And you actually _can_ sell 
GPL:d code.  You can ask money for a GPL:d program and even get it.
The thing is that it transfers the ownership of that particular copy of the 
code.

So, if this data were licensed in a similar manner, they could ask for a price 
for selling it to you in the first place (for the delivery) but could not 
restrict you from reusing anyway you like.

The situation can be compared to paying someone to write GPL:d code: When he 
releases the code, it becomes free, but until then it's just in his own use. 
But because we want that code to be written, we are ready to pay him that 
one-time bulk sum to get it written and released.

So, if we can get that data from somewhere else, we could simply look for it. 
If they do not want to sponsor us, maybe we can find someone else, who has 
the access to the data (has bought it) and will provide that.

Anyhow - honestly - I would like to see that license agreement of theirs... 
Would you kindly ask for that for assasment, so we could evaluate it?

The one thing that puzzles me here is, have they actually managed to write a 
licence which forbids redistribution of data (which I doubt) and if not, for 
how long they expect collect revenues for such, until someone like Kalzium 
comes in and just puts it all easily and publicly available.

-- 
Vivere necesse est, navigare non est necesse.
		Tuomas Nurmi