License disagreement

[Mathnerd314]

https://openregulatory.com/template-license/ says CC-BY-NC-SA, here it says CC BY. Which is right? My understanding from reading the license is that using the templates internally in a company would count as a commercial purpose and therefore be prohibited by NC.

[Mathnerd314]

Also https://openregulatory.com/templates/ says it is an "open-source" license but NC is incompatible with https://opensource.org/osd 6. "The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.". CC-BY-SA is fine though.

[olieidel]

Hey @Mathnerd314, thanks for raising this, those are good points!

We switched the license to CC-BY-NC-SA a while ago. The context of that was that we don't want other companies building software on top of our templates and selling that, e.g. eQMS vendors.

In spirit, this is somewhat similar to what e.g. Plausible Analytics does - they open source their software, but they don't want other companies to take that software, wrap that into a new product and sell it, hence their choice of the AGPL license. Here's a more elaborate blog post from them with their reasoning.

This is quite similar to our thoughts - from my point of view, it's still fine to use our templates as part of a company's quality management system if your goal is to bring a medical device to market. But it's no longer allowed to package our templates into some sort of software / offering which you sell.

Is this license a perfect fit for this use case? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. If you have a suggestion for a better license which incorporates these thoughts, feel free to suggest one!

[Mathnerd314]

I think AGPL would work? I bring it up both because you mentioned it and it seems appropriate to your constraints. It doesn't prevent someone from building a fully open source eQMS with your templates, but these proprietary eQMS vendors you are worried about are not going to comply with it. It has attribution requirements so it is stricter than CC-BY. It is just a bit strange language-wise since templates are usually considered writing rather than software. But in this case it seems like your main concern is someone turning the templates into software.

CC-BY-SA is also reasonable, it is not as strong as agpl though in terms of copyleft-ness.

[olieidel]

Interesting! Will think about it and, unless I come up with something else in the next few days, switch to AGPL :)

Thanks so much for your thoughts!