There have been many debates over the years about licensing and copyright for archetypes. Now the ADL 1.4 and related specifications are art of CEN and ISO 13606, and archetypes (as well as templates) are being created all over the world.
There is still no consensus on how they should be licensed - more specifically, what the guidelines should be to determine licensing. What copyright and licenses should be applied may well differ based on who creates them, what their purpose is, and also considerations like who can use the data created using them.
I have created a page to help discuss these issues, see http://www.openehr.org/wiki/display/oecom/Archetypes±+Copyright+and+Licensing
My expectation of the end-game is something like the following:
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for most archetypes,
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the copyright is either with the originator (organisation or individual) or openEHR.org, or some other similar non-profit organisation
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the license question is not that complex, and something like CC-BY should work; just a case of choosing which version & variant
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for some archetypes created by companies or other organisations, there might be other requirements, and some kind of guidance would have to be developed for this.
To get to a conclusion (whatever it is), I propose a discussion, hopefully not too painfully long, or replicating all the language-lawyer discussions in the open source software space - mainly to determine the requirements of the openEHR community (including any user of any specification, model or archetype) with respect to archetypes.
Feel free to a) discuss here, b) comment the wiki page c) modify the wiki page
- thomas beale