kwinkunks

@kwinkunks

Joined on Apr 30, 2020

  • It's common to see non-commercial (NC) and no derivatives (ND) clauses on industry hackathon dataset licenses. Please understand that these clauses are not 'open' according to the Open Definition (https://opendefinition.org/), or any other opinion on open data that I know of. Neither of the NC and ND restrictions is compatible with open data. This is a problem because open data is one of the cornerstones of reproducible science and engineering. What's more, in my experience many hackathon participants would like to share their work with others, or perhaps publish their work in the literature, or even go off and develop commercial business solutions. In addition, many scientists employed in industry (e.g. at some of your sponsors) would like to participate in hackathons. The license on the SEM dataset makes all of these possibilities -- all of which would be great for geothermal industry -- much harder or impossible. (I, for one, will not touch non-open datasets because the litigation risk is too great -- ask the seismic company GSI about this if you doubt it's real!) So I wonder if you will consider changing the license on this dataset? Personally I recommend CC BY or CC BY-SA for open data in the sciences. I even prefer them to 'public domain' licenses, because they require attribution and therefore preserve provenance.
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