IT Infrastructure will be evolved by Open Data.

Photo by Alexandre Godreau on Unsplash

“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).”

Open Knowledge International | Open Definition home page

https://opendefinition.org/

The world of software has accomplished great advancements with the support of open source.

And we believe that cloud design as open data will bring about a similar evolution to the world of IT infrastructure. It will be because this kind of free modification and distribution enables the reproduction of value and unleashes the potential ingenuity and productivity of creators on a grand scale.

Nevertheless, our actual society does not yet have consistent rules that define open data and regulate how it is used. It is a matter of copyrights, database rights, and other laws that are individually regulated by each nation. Thus, for those of us who are advancing the accumulation of open data, the ideal approach is to receive uniformly clear licenses from creators when we collect cloud designs. Fortunately, the pioneers of the open movement have arranged a variety of methods to make such licenses simpler, and we will look at which of these methods is most appropriate for cloud design below.

1: A software license or a content license?

For software, it is said that a software license must be used for technical reasons. The differences in secondary uses, such as the source and binary and the static and dynamic links, all have an effect on the scope of the rights granted. Since cloud design can include cloud automation code such as Cloud Formation, the same kinds of licensing characteristics as with software arise. But this holds true only if the creator reserves any rights pertaining to the reuse of the cloud design. We don’t think this is necessary (although we’d be happy to write, on a separate occasion, about how creators ought to be compensated for their efforts!), and we believe that a simpler content license will be friendlier to users and have a strong effect in promoting distribution.

2: How about copyleft or the public domain?

To give cloud design an open status, there is the method of releasing the rights and placing the design in the public domain or the method known as copyleft, in which permission for reuse is given while the creator retains their rights as-is. The former allows anyone to monopolize the rights to copies and derivative works, but the latter does not.

In copyleft, the open license is transmitted onward, making it an excellent mechanism that contributes to the development of the open movement. As to whether works must be open or not, however, we think that this should be left up to the judgment of each individual creator, even if said works are derivative works. (Again, there needs to be a separate discussion on how creators who have decided to open their works should be compensated for their efforts.) Furthermore, we think that there is no need for users to be tied up in complicated license provisions. Creating a situation in which reuse is easier, if even slightly, will contribute more to the circulation of cloud designs and the advancement of IT infrastructure and subsequently the creation of services than will the prevention of monopolization.

Accordingly, we think that the license best suited to cloud design at present might be CC0, a representative non-copyleft content license. Additionally, CC0 is a license format for placing a creator’s neighboring rights in the public domain. This license does not release any included trademark rights or patent rights, which we think makes it more manageable.

CC0: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC0_FAQ

Representative Software Licenses:

— Copyleft: GPL, LGPL, MPL

— Non-copyleft: MIT, Apache, BSD

Representative Content Licenses:

— Copyleft: CC-BY-SA, GFDL, ODbL

— Non-copyleft: CC0, PDDL