Hi David,
Firs of all, leaving aside licensing issues and the eventual RM choice, I would really appreciate working collaboratively on these models with your clinical guys. I would be happy to do this via CKM if you felt that might facilitate progress. As Sam says, lets make sure we keep the clinical models consistent even if the final formailsm differs. I don’t think the usual 13606/opeEHR philosophical differences have much impact in the histopathology space and when I did the original work for the RCPA, I was impressed at the level of international cooperation that exits in the community already. In hindsight, I would have modelled some of the histopath content a bit differently and since none of these archetypes are formally published, we do have an opportunity to learn from that experience + of course include any new requirements that your clinicians identify.
With regard to licensing, firstly I agree with Sam that attribution is to the Foundation, and not to me personally. By all means send me a large cheque if that makes you feel better 
The reason for the current CC-BY-SA licensing is really only to try and prevent restrictive re-commerciaisation of archetypes that were originally developed withan open licence.
There is no within the openEHr community about what we are trying to do. The differences of opinion are about how best to achieve this goal with the minimum of restriction
So, the principles we are trying to work to are that …
- You are perfectly entitled to adapt or derive any openEHR archetypes
- You are perfectly entitled to use these in a commercial application
- Personally I am not bothered if you try to sell them (that may not be a consensus view).
- We are definitely bothered if you try to assert copyright and attempt to restrict others from using or adapting the original archetypes or derivatives of those archetypes.
It is (4) that is the key problem here and archetypes live in a tricky limbo between software artefacts and human document which means that legal opinion is not well-based on precedent or evidence and making a decision on the best licence is tricky.
Personally, I take the view that, as a clinician, the work that I did was simply a restatement of universal clinical knowledge and as such must really stay in the open domain. One of the problems in this area is that CAP (College of American Pathologists) have done some similar histopath work, in particular defining SNOMED bindings but have locked the IP away. I think this is against the spirit of
clinical knowledge development, though actually I know how to access the bindings via the public domain :-).
I really do not know whether the transformation from an openEHR archetype to 13606 would be still be considered ‘derivative’ by a court of law but if we get into that world we have all lost the plot, in my opinion.
To sum up. From a personal perspective and my interpretation of CC-BY-SA and the Foundation objectives, feel free to use anything you want. Unless you have a cunning plan to commercialise the archetypes and then lock the rest of us out, I do not see any problem at all, wether or not your work is regarded as derivative
But let’s find a way of collaborating - would you be interested in working via CKM, accepting that you might want to convert the end product to a 13606ENTRY?
This is all part of a very interesting wider public debate about we reward those who create or add value to content/knowledge without the dead hand of patents and resultant legal dispute.
Regards,
Ian